Franz Hinkelammert – About Things That Matter

What Is Democracy For? China’s Whole-Process Democracy and the Common Good

My recent OpEdNews article, “China’s Example and the Need to Rethink Democracy Itself,” prompted an interesting response from editor-in-chief Rob Kall. He agreed that America’s inability to think beyond the next election is becoming one of our greatest national weaknesses. But he asked me to explain more fully what the Chinese call “whole-process people’s democracy.” How does it actually work? Is it merely another name for one-party rule, or does it embody a fundamentally different understanding of democracy?

Those questions deserve a careful answer because most Americans—including many progressives—know surprisingly little about China’s own explanation of its political system. We generally define democracy almost entirely by its procedures. If citizens vote, if competing parties contest elections, if freedom of speech is protected, and if power changes hands peacefully, we call a nation democratic. If those conditions are absent or limited, we usually do not.

Chinese political theory begins somewhere else.

Its proponents argue that democracy should be judged not only by how governments are chosen but also by what governments accomplish for ordinary people. The legitimacy of government lies not simply in electoral competition but in reducing poverty, expanding education, building infrastructure, protecting public health, caring for the environment, and planning for future generations. In that sense, China’s theory of “whole-process people’s democracy” is consequentialist. It asks citizens to judge government by its results.

Whether one ultimately accepts that understanding or not, it raises a larger question that reaches far beyond China.

What is democracy for?

As I reflected on Rob Kall’s question, I found myself thinking not only about Chinese political theory but also about Jesus, liberation theology, Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII to Pope Leo XIV, and even the Marxist ecological economist John Bellamy Foster. Strange as it may seem, these very different traditions converge around a remarkably similar principle. Political institutions should ultimately be judged by what they produce for human beings, especially for those who are most vulnerable.

Jesus expressed the principle with characteristic simplicity. “By their fruits you shall know them.” That sentence may be the clearest statement of consequentialist ethics ever uttered.

Jesus repeatedly judged persons and institutions by their consequences rather than by their claims. Good trees produce good fruit; bad trees produce bad fruit. In the parable of the Last Judgment, nations are evaluated not by their constitutions or political procedures but by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited prisoners, and cared for the sick. The decisive question is always: What happens to “the least of these” (Matthew 25: 31-46)?

Liberation theology extends precisely that biblical insight into politics and economics. Gustavo Gutiérrez famously defined theology as “critical reflection on praxis.” Orthodoxy must be tested by orthopraxis. Correct ideas alone are insufficient. A society is judged by the lives its institutions make possible, especially for the poor.

Enrique Dussel sharpened the point by distinguishing between what he called formal and material democracy. Formal democracy concerns procedures: elections, constitutions, legislatures, political parties, and legal rights. These are indispensable achievements. But they are not enough. Material democracy asks whether those institutions actually reproduce and enhance human life. Do they enable communities to flourish? Do they defend the excluded? Do they protect future generations? If they do not, procedural legitimacy alone cannot redeem them.

That distinction helps explain what Chinese theorists mean by “whole-process democracy.”

According to its proponents, democracy is not exhausted by election day. Citizens directly elect representatives at the village level, while higher-level people’s congresses are chosen through successive representative levels. Consultation continues throughout the policy process through congresses, advisory bodies, professional organizations, universities, business associations, workers’ organizations, and representatives of China’s many ethnic communities. Chinese scholars argue that democracy therefore consists not only of elections but of consultation, planning, implementation, evaluation, and revision.

Western observers frequently challenge aspects of this account, raising important questions about political pluralism, freedom of expression, and civil liberties. Those questions deserve serious discussion. Yet the Chinese model also asks a question Americans too seldom ask ourselves: What has our own democracy actually accomplished?

For decades Americans have watched infrastructure age, political polarization deepen, homelessness increase, life expectancy stagnate compared with many peer nations, and public confidence in institutions decline. Elections continue on schedule. Campaigns become ever more expensive. Every election is described as the most important in our lifetime. Yet many structural problems remain stubbornly unresolved.

One reason, I believe, lies in the nature of our political system itself.

The permanent competition between Democrats and Republicans makes sustained national planning extraordinarily difficult. Policies begun by one administration are often dismantled by the next—not necessarily because they have failed but because they belong to political opponents. The electoral calendar becomes stronger than the planning calendar.

China’s political system has evolved differently. Its supporters point to Five-Year Plans embedded within much longer strategic visions extending over decades. Whatever one thinks of particular policies, this institutional continuity makes it easier to pursue infrastructure projects, industrial strategies, poverty reduction, and technological development that require sustained public commitment.

Its advocates also note that senior leaders typically accumulate extensive administrative experience before reaching national office, usually serving at county, municipal, and provincial levels over many years. The underlying ideal is that governing capacity should be demonstrated before greater authority is entrusted.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two systems concerns the relationship between political power and economic power.

Supporters of China’s system argue that the Communist Party’s historic responsibility is to ensure that concentrated private wealth does not capture the state. Whether contemporary China consistently fulfills that aspiration is a matter of legitimate debate. Yet the aspiration itself points toward an issue Americans can scarcely avoid.

Who governs our republic?

Increasingly, I fear it is what I have elsewhere called the “Epstein class.” By that phrase I do not mean wealthy people as such. Wealth honestly earned has enriched every civilization. I mean something more dangerous: an oligarchic class capable of converting immense private wealth into political influence, legal privilege, media power, and practical immunity from accountability. Jeffrey Epstein became, in my view, not the cause of this phenomenon but its most recognizable symbol.

Seen from this perspective, the defining political question of the twenty-first century is not capitalism versus socialism. Every major economy employs markets. The deeper question is whether markets govern society or whether society governs markets.

Here an unexpected convergence appears.

Beginning with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Catholic social teaching has consistently rejected both collectivist absolutism and laissez-faire capitalism. It has defended private property while insisting that ownership always carries social obligations. Markets are valuable instruments. They are not sovereign moral authorities. Economic life exists to serve the common good.

Pope Leo XIV develops that same tradition in Magnifica Humanitas. Reflecting on artificial intelligence, technological power, and global finance, he insists that technology, markets, and capital must remain subordinate to human dignity, ecological responsibility, and the integral flourishing of humanity. They are servants, never masters.

Remarkably, John Bellamy Foster reaches a strikingly similar conclusion from an entirely different intellectual tradition. He warns against what he calls the “fetishism” of artificial intelligence and of the market itself—the tendency to treat technological and economic forces as though they were beyond democratic control. Democratic societies, he argues, should consciously direct economic development toward ecological sustainability and human well-being rather than allowing markets alone to determine humanity’s future.

Franz Hinkelammert anticipated both arguments decades ago. He warned that modern capitalism easily transforms the market into an idol demanding endless sacrifice. Workers become expendable. Communities become disposable. Nature becomes merely another commodity. Against this idolatry, Hinkelammert proposed what he called “the criterion of life.” Every institution, every economy, every political system must finally answer one question:

Does it serve life?

Conclusion

Rob Kall asked me to explain China’s understanding of democracy.

In the end, I found myself confronting a much larger question, Viz., What is government for?

If its highest purpose is merely to organize elections, then the American model has much to teach the world. But if the purpose of government is to secure the common good, protect the vulnerable, subordinate economic power to democratic authority, preserve the earth for future generations, and enable human beings to flourish, then elections are not the end of democracy. They are only one of its instruments.

That is the challenge posed by China’s theory of whole-process democracy. Whether or not one ultimately accepts its answer, it forces us to ask whether democracy should be judged only by its procedures or also by its consequences.

Jesus had no hesitation about the answer.

He never said, “By their constitutions you shall know them.”

He never said, “By their elections you shall know them.”

He said, “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Perhaps that is the question the twenty-first century can no longer avoid. Not simply which nation is more democratic, but which political institutions consistently bear the fruits of justice, peace, sustainability, human dignity, and the common good.

Until we are willing to judge every political and economic system—including our own—by that standard, democracy will remain little more than a procedure. It will never become what it was always meant to be: a way of organizing society so that life, especially the lives of “the least of these,” may flourish.

July 4th: What Made Me Stop Loving “America”

Every Fourth of July Americans are invited to celebrate freedom, democracy, and the birth of the republic. This year, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, I find myself unable to join the celebration.

A few days ago, listening to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, I heard Princeton historian Eddie Glaude utter words that startled me by expressing exactly what I had been struggling to admit to myself: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Those words open his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, which examines what our official commemorations leave out as much as what they include.

Unlike Professor Glaude, however, I cannot say that I never loved America. Quite the contrary. I was raised to love it instinctively. My journey has not been one from radicalism to disillusionment. It has been the reverse: from unquestioning patriotism to reluctant dissent. It was a conversion I resisted almost every step of the way.

I grew up in what I would call a quietly Republican family. My parents usually described themselves as independents, but I suspect they voted otherwise. I admired my Uncle Ben because, unlike my other uncles, he worked downtown in Chicago at the First National Bank. Success, respectability, and patriotism all seemed to fit naturally together.

My education reinforced those assumptions. I spent nine years in Catholic elementary school, thirteen more in Catholic seminaries, and another five years studying theology in Rome as a young priest. When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, I remember wondering why he had wandered into foreign affairs. As far as I was concerned, civil rights were one thing; Vietnam was another.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, one of my favorite seminary professors remarked, “A great man died today.” That simple sentence reveals how conservative my early formation really was.

My first presidential vote was cast for Barry Goldwater.

Reality, however, has a way of intruding on ideology.

The Vietnam War was my first great awakening. I remember reading in Time magazine—of all places—that American leaders opposed internationally supervised elections in Vietnam because Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won. I can still remember arguing with my father about what that implied. If democracy was our highest value, why were we preventing democratic elections?

At almost the same time Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council and announced his intention to “open the windows” of the Church to the modern world. I resisted that as well. I defended traditional Catholicism against classmates who seemed eager to dismantle it. I even found myself defending Thomas à Kempis‘ The Imitation of Christ against criticism.

Yet resistance gradually gave way to curiosity.

I immersed myself in the documents of Vatican II. I read theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and even the young Josef Ratzinger, then one of the Council’s progressive voices. Even more important were the scripture courses taught by our remarkable professor Eamonn O’Doherty. Under his guidance I learned that the Bible is not a single literary form but a library containing myth, poetry, legend, law, debate, parable, apocalypse, and theological reflection. To read every passage as straightforward history is to misunderstand Scripture itself.

That realization liberated me from biblical literalism. More surprisingly, it also taught me to read secular history differently. If biblical texts required careful attention to genre, perspective, and purpose, why should national histories be treated as transparent accounts of objective fact?

That question changed everything.

History came first. Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, Walter Rodney‘s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth revealed an America I had never encountered in classrooms. Economics followed. Frances Moore Lappé‘s Food First and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer‘s The Politics of Compassion exposed structures of hunger and inequality that conventional economics preferred to ignore. Then years of teaching Great Books at Berea College required me to wrestle seriously with Marx alongside Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Dickens. Little by little, assumptions I had once regarded as self-evident dissolved under the weight of evidence.

But books alone did not transform me.

Liberation theology did.

After earning my doctorate in moral theology, I became fascinated by a movement that insisted theology must begin not from the perspective of the powerful but from that of the poor. Faith, it argued, should be judged by whether it liberates those who suffer, not by whether it justifies existing institutions.

That conviction took me far beyond libraries.

My wife Peggy and I studied and worked throughout Latin America and the Global South—in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and Israel-Palestine. We became friends with Paulo Freire, whose understanding of education as liberation profoundly influenced both of us. In Costa Rica we joined the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, where Franz Hinkelammert and Helio Gallardo became two of my most important teachers.

Neither man simply gave me new information. They taught me something much more valuable: how to see.

They invited me to view history from below—from the perspective of those who bear the consequences of imperial decisions made thousands of miles away. Peasants, workers, indigenous communities, political prisoners, refugees, and theologians throughout Latin America repeatedly described the United States in ways that initially seemed exaggerated to me. Gradually I realized they understood my country’s history far better than I did.

Liberation theology completed what Vatican II had begun. It taught me that the decisive question is never whether a nation calls itself democratic, Christian, or free. The question is always: What happens to the poor? Everything else is secondary.

Seen from that perspective, a different America emerged.

It was a republic built upon slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples. It repeatedly overthrew governments that threatened American corporate interests. It armed dictators while speaking eloquently about democracy. As Martin Luther King Jr. concluded near the end of his life, it had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Eventually I encountered an admission even more startling than King’s. In 1948, George Kennan—the architect of America’s Cold War strategy—explained privately what U.S. foreign policy actually sought:

“. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. Our real task…is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We should cease to talk about vague…objectives such as human rights…and democratization…. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

For me, that memo confirmed what liberation theologians had already been teaching for years.

So today I find myself agreeing, though for reasons different from Professor Glaude’s opening declaration.

No, I no longer love what is commonly called “America”—if by that we mean an empire built upon military supremacy, economic domination, and stories that conceal as much as they reveal.

But neither have I become cynical.

I still love the American people. I love those who organize, protest, teach, tell the truth, and refuse to surrender the country’s unrealized promise. I love the constitutional ideals that have so often been betrayed. And I love the generations of Americans who have struggled to redeem the republic from its own mythology.

Perhaps that is what Jesus would have understood as well. He loved neither the Roman Empire nor the religious establishment that collaborated with it. His loyalty belonged instead to what he called the Kingdom of God—a social order measured not by wealth or military power but by the well-being of the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the stranger. Liberation theology taught me to ask of every nation, including my own, not whether it proclaims itself exceptional, but whether it stands with those people.

If my understanding of America changed, it was not because I became more cynical. It changed because teachers, colleagues, friends, and ordinary people throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East patiently taught me to see history through the eyes of those who pay the price for empire.

For that gift—and especially for the friendships that made it possible—I remain profoundly grateful.

On this Fourth of July, perhaps genuine patriotism begins not with celebration, but with truth.

Our 50th Wedding Anniversary in Greece

I’ve been away from my blog for too long. But I have a good excuse.

From the 5^th to the 15^th of June Peggy and I along with our whole immediate family including our 8 grandchildren were partying – on the island of Sifnos in Greece. The reason? June 5^thhappened to be Peggy’s and my 50^th wedding anniversary.

Yes, 50 years! And what a journey that has been. Peggy recounted it in a beautiful book of photos she gave me in Greece. It reminded everyone that we had met at Berea College in 1974. It reminded me that Peggy captured my heart immediately.

Two years later we tied the knot.

Then beginning in 1979 our children blessed our union, Maggie, Brendan, and Patrick. Together and often accompanied by students and Berea faculty, we traveled the world trying to understand it (with the help of scholars like Paulo Freire and Franz Hinkelammert) “from below,” i.e., from the viewpoint of the world’s majority impoverished by colonialism and neocolonialism. That entailed studying in Europe (especially Italy, and Spain) Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, India, Mexico, and (perhaps most importantly) Cuba.

L-R: Baba, Gaga, Brendan, Patrick, Maggie

Now we have eight grandchildren: Eva, Oscar, Orlando, Markandeya, Sebastian, Genevieve, Madelein, and Sophie. All of them were with us in Sifnos.

L-R: Orlando, Oscar, Sebastian, Gaga, Genevieve, Baba, Markandeya, Eva, Sophie,

Our daughter, Maggie, had arranged everything. And it was completely wonderful. It began with our first Business-Class flight to Athens via Emirate Airlines. I never experienced such travel luxury. That was followed by a 2-hour ferry trip to splendid accommodations on Sifnos where we lodged in a multi-unit complex, and we were the only guests.

Our daughter Maggie and son-in-law, Kerry

Each morning began with an elaborate breakfast with all of us seated around a long outdoor table. Half of our dinners were similarly presented. For the rest, we all traveled to wonderful nearby restaurants. One day was spent “at sea” on a catamaran yacht that took us to a large cave where we watched bats flying overhead and to several bays on the Aegean for swimming and snorkeling. On a mountain bordering one of those bays, our son-in-law, Kerry and 2 of our grandsons, Orlando and Sebastian, climbed up to a big-horned mountain goat to feed him lettuce by hand – even little Sebastian at just 5 years old.

Our best experiences however were family interactions. What a joy to watch our grandchildren (the eldest nearly 18 and the youngest 3) exhibiting their unique personalities conversing and playing games involving baseball, basketball, throwing a football, swimming, ping-pong, board games and just chilling out alongside the swimming pool.

And then there were the adult conversations over dinner always initiated by Maggie with leading questions about Peggy’s and my courtship or more generally about e.g., “an experience you’ve had involving cars,” or “an embarrassment you’ve survived.” Those conversation-starters always led to revealing and endearing revelations we’d otherwise never have known. Of course, each story was followed by a toast.

And then there were the hours that Peggy and I shared seated on our Sifnos beach reading and talking – rehearsing the blessings and growth experiences our life together has provided.

For me, the entire Greek adventure was topped off by my first helicopter ride from Sifnos to Athens to visit the Parthenon with Eva and Orlando. I loved it. For some inexplicable reason, even though I had spent 5 years in nearby Rome (1967-’72) I had never seen Athens. I’m glad I didn’t pass it up this time.

So, I hope you’ll understand why my blog-silence has been so resounding just lately. Thanks to Maggie and Kerry, there was good reason. And it was all truly extraordinary and unforgettable.

Returning to Rome: Redrawing My Map of God and the World

I am back in Rome — a city that once formed me more deeply than I knew at the time. This time Peggy and I will be here for three months visiting our diplomat son, his wife, and our three little granddaughters.

More than fifty years ago, as a young priest, I walked these same streets believing I stood near the center of the Christian world. Rome felt solid, ancient, authoritative. Theology here carried the weight of centuries. I absorbed its categories, its rhythms, its confidence. That was soon after Vatican II (1962-’65). I was only beginning to question the map I had inherited.

Now, decades later, I find myself returning not as a defender of that center nor as its adversary, but as someone who has been slowly reshaped by teachers, students, and experiences far from these stones. Being here again has stirred gratitude — and reflection. I see more clearly how much of my life has been an apprenticeship in learning to redraw the map I once took for granted.

Learning to Turn Things Over

To begin with, my teachers here in the Eternal City were dynamite in terms of creatively upsetting my theological and even political certainties. I think especially of Magnus Lohrer and Raphael Schulte at the Atheneum Anselmianum on Rome’s Aventine hill. That first year in Rome, lectures at the Anselmo were in Latin. Regardless, Lohrer and Schulte called all my categories into question. They had me seriously reading non-Catholic theological giants for the first time. I brought it all home to unending lunch and dinner debates with the fifteen or so young priests (who were also pursuing terminal degrees in Rome) at our Columban house on Corso Trieste 57.

But the deepest fissures in my theological and political certainties came after Rome – in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and especially in Costa Rica, where Peggy and I became fellows at the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, a liberation theology think tank. The center of it all was Franz Hinkelammert who became not only my teacher, but colleague and friend. As an economist and theologian, he adopted critical thinking as his own central category.

I remember telling him, somewhat playfully, that I thought I had figured out the method behind his approach to the discipline: he seemed always to take what passed as “common sense” and quietly invert it with exquisite historical, philosophical, and theological insight. Markets are described as free. Economic growth is described as necessary. Sacrifice of the vulnerable is described as realistic. He would simply ask: who benefits? who suffers? what “god” is being served?

He smiled when I said that — a smile that felt less like approval and more like invitation. He was not urging me toward cynicism. He was urging me toward attentiveness.

Under his influence, I began to recognize how easily societies sanctify their own arrangements. The market can become providence. National security can become destiny. Even theology can become a cloak for power. What I once called realism I learned to approach more cautiously.

That habit of questioning did not make me certain. It made me slower to accept easy answers.

Learning to Relocate the Center

Another teacher, Enrique Dussel, unsettled me in a different way. I first met him in Brazil during a seminar specifically on liberation theology. The cream of the crop – theologians I had been reading for years – were there.

I still see Dussel at a whiteboard, sketching a world map from memory. He did not begin in Athens, as my education had. He began in Egypt. He traced the movement of civilizations across Asia. He lingered over China’s long intellectual and cultural history before Europe entered the frame at all.

“Wherever I lecture,” he would say, “people repeat the same historical story: ancient, medieval, modern.” Then he would perceptively add, “That story is not universal. It is European.” Leonardo da Vinci’s futuristic drawings were lifted straight from Chinese engineers.

I felt enlarged listening to him. The world was older and more intricate than the timeline I had inherited. Europe’s achievements remained real, but they were no longer singular or central in the way I had assumed.

After his lectures, I found myself trying to reproduce his map — not because I wished to argue, but because I wanted to see as he saw. His point was not so much to diminish Europe, as to free history from provincial boundaries.

That lesson stayed with me. Once you realize that a “center” may simply be a perspective, you become cautious about every center — political, economic, even theological.

Encounters in the Global South

My years of teaching in the United States and traveling in Latin America and other parts of the Global South deepened that reorientation. Theology in Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and Mexico was not an abstract discipline. It was bound up with hunger, repression, resilience, hope.

Through thinkers like Pablo Richard and Elsa Tamez, I saw how scripture could sound different when read from below rather than from established centers of power. Through Rosemary Ruether, I came to see how deeply gendered our language about God and authority has been. Helio Gallardo showed how The United States’ regime change policies prevented human development throughout the Global South. Vandana Shiva widened my awareness of how economic systems scar both land and people in the name of progress. And Dom Hélder Câmara reminded me, in his gentle way, that charity without justice leaves underlying structures intact. He famously said, “‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’

None of these encounters destroyed my faith. They complicated it. They forced me to acknowledge that what I had once regarded as neutral theology was often shaped by social location and power.

Over time, I began to describe myself not simply as Catholic, bus as belonging to the Church’s “loyal opposition.” I still claim that designation. I did not wish to abandon the Church. I owed it too much. But I could not ignore its entanglements with empire or its silences in the face of suffering.

I learned that loyalty without critique can drift toward idolatry. But critique without love can harden into bitterness. Holding both has never been simple.

The God I Was Taught — and the God I Pray To

Returning to Rome has also stirred memories of the God-image that accompanied my early formation.

God was Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, Punisher (even Torturer!). Sin was pervasive. Conscience was vigilant. That framework gave me seriousness and discipline. It also sometimes fostered fear and self-scrutiny that felt heavier than grace.

Over the years, influenced by the teachers I have named and by the communities I have encountered, that image loosened. I began to see how easily our political imaginations shape our theology. A hierarchical society imagines a hierarchical heaven. An imperial culture imagines a commanding deity.

Genesis says something simpler and perhaps more daring: we are clay, animated by breath. Clay is not flawless. It is vulnerable, shaped by experience, capable of cracking and reforming. The problem in Eden is not embodiment but mistrust — the suggestion that God is withholding, that God is threatened by human growth.

Slowly, I found myself praying less to a divine Auditor and more to a Life-Giver. Paul’s contrast between Adam and Christ came to sound less like courtroom procedure and more like two ways of being human: hiding in shame or standing in trust.

That shift did not happen overnight. It came through study, mistakes, conversations, disappointments, and, occasionally, grace.

Sitting in Trastevere

Recently, sitting in Santa Maria in Trastevere, I felt the weight of all these strands all at once.

Trastevere was once a district of the marginal — dockworkers, Jews, early Christians. Yet the Church that took root among them eventually learned to speak the language of empire. The basilica’s golden mosaics shimmer above centuries of compromise and devotion alike.

The Church, I realized again, is both clay and gold.

So am I.

If my children sometimes experience my positions as strong or unsettling, I understand. They did not sit in those classrooms. They did not travel in those communities. They did not hear those lectures. My convictions were not born of sudden rebellion. They accumulated slowly, sometimes against my own initial resistance.

I do not claim to see perfectly now. If anything, these teachers made me more cautious about certainty. They taught me to ask whose voices are missing, whose suffering is hidden, which assumptions have gone unquestioned.

Returning to Rome does not feel like a triumph. It feels like a reminder. A reminder of where I began. A reminder of how much I was given. A reminder of how much I had to unlearn. And a reminder that any map — even the one I now hold — remains partial.

Clay, Breath, and Ongoing Revision

The longer I live, the less interested I am in appearing marble. Marble is impressive, but rigid. Clay is humbler, more exposed, more capable of change. Genesis names us clay. The Spirit breathes.

If there has been a “crime,” it was never Rome itself. It was the temptation to mistake any center — any institution, any system, any theology — for the whole.

The teachers who shaped me did not hand me a new dogma. They handed me a way of seeing: turn the claim over, redraw the map, listen to the margins, be wary of sanctified power, hold loyalty and critique together.

Rome, with all its beauty and ambiguity, is a fitting place to remember that.

I return not to condemn, nor to congratulate myself for having moved beyond something, but to give thanks for the long, unfinished work of being reshaped.

The map has been redrawn more than once in my life. It may yet need redrawing again.

For now, I remain grateful — for Rome, for the margins, for the teachers who widened my world, and for the breath that continues to animate clay.

The Commandments and the Epstein Revelations: Whom Does God’s Law Really Protect?

Readings for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 15:15-20; Psalm 119; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

Let me say it straight out: the Epstein affair is not primarily about sex. It is about law. It is about whether the commandments — and the legal systems supposedly derived from them — apply equally to everyone.

For decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved among billionaires, politicians, royalty, financiers, academics, and cultural elites. His crimes were known. Complaints were made. Investigations occurred. Yet he received an extraordinary plea deal. Associates remain shielded. Documents remain sealed. Networks remain largely untouched.

Meanwhile, poor defendants fill prisons for far lesser crimes – and in the case of immigrants and asylum seekers, for no crimes at all. Petty theft, drug possession, probation violations, and “illegal” border crossings — these are prosecuted with relentless enforcement of law.

If you want a relevant commentary on such two-tiered systems of “justice,” look no further than today’s liturgical readings. They are explosive in their contemporary application.

Sirach: God Commands No Injustice

Start with Sirach 15: 15-20. There the book’s author says: “If you choose, you can keep the commandments… He has set before you fire and water… life and death.”

At first glance, that sounds like individual moral exhortation. Choose good. Avoid evil. But Sirach adds something devastating: “No one does he command to act unjustly; to none does he give license to sin.”

That line destroys every attempt to sanctify unjust systems like ours. I mean in the United States, injustice is routinely protected by law. After all, Epstein’s plea deal in 2008 was legal. The shielding of his powerful associates has been legal. Non-disclosure agreements are legal. Sealed records are legal.

But Sirach says God commands no injustice.

If the law functions to shield predators when they are rich and well-connected while punishing the poor with mechanical severity, then the issue is not simply moral failure. It is structural perversion.

Liberation theology (i.e. non-literalist biblical interpretation supported by modern scripture scholarship) reminds us that “choice” is structured. The poor do not choose within the same field of protection as billionaires. There, fire and water are not distributed evenly. Life and death are not equally accessible.

The commandment is not merely “Don’t sin.” The deeper question is: Does the legal order reflect God’s refusal to legalize injustice?

Psalm 119: Blessed Are Those Who Follow the Law

Now look at today’s responsorial psalm. It’s refrain proclaims: “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

But what is the law for?

As José Porfirio Miranda and Norman Gottwald argue, the Decalogue emerged not as abstract piety but as social protection. It arose among people resisting royal systems that accumulated land, wealth, and power in elite hands.

Both theologians remind us that biblical law was a shield for subsistence households. “You shall not steal” originally meant: the powerful may not confiscate the livelihood of the vulnerable. “You shall not covet” meant desire backed by power must be restrained.

In that light, now ask the uncomfortable question: when billionaires operate in networks of mutual protection and the law seems reluctant to expose them fully, is that still Torah? Or is it what the prophets called “corruption at the gate?”

Psalm 119 blesses those who follow God’s law — not those who manipulate civil law to protect privilege.

Paul: The Wisdom of the Rulers

In the same spirit of Sirach and Psalm 119, Paul speaks of “a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age… who are passing away.” He also adds something chilling: “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The cross was a legal execution. It was state-sanctioned. It was justified under Roman law and enabled by religious authority.

That’s Paul’s point.

The rulers always believe their system is rational and necessary. Franz Hinkelammert reminds us that ruling ideologies present themselves as inevitable. Markets are inevitable. Elite networks are inevitable. Certain people are untouchable.

When the Epstein affair reveals how proximity to wealth and power appears to blunt accountability, we are witnessing what Paul calls “the wisdom of this age.” A wisdom that protects itself.

The rulers crucified Jesus legally. Legality is not the same as justice.

Jesus: Fulfilling the Law by Protecting the Vulnerable

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus declares:
“I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”

Then he radicalizes it. “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not kill.’ But I say to you, whoever humiliates…”

Jesus’ point is that dehumanization precedes violence. When victims are dismissed because they lack status, when their testimony is doubted because they are young, poor, or socially marginal, contempt is already at work.

“You have heard it said… You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, whoever looks with lust…”

Could these words be more pertinent to the Epstein Affair? In a world where wealthy men are allowed to treat vulnerable underage girls and women as property, lust backed by power means coercion. Jesus targets the interior logic of such domination.

His teaching on divorce does the same thing. It sides with the economically vulnerable spouse. Legal permission did not equal justice.

Notice the pattern: every intensification of the commandment in today’s readings closes loopholes that allow the powerful to exploit the weak.

That is fulfillment of the law. If a legal system permits exploitation through influence, money, and secrecy, it has not fulfilled the law. It has hollowed it out.

Two Systems

The Epstein affair is not an anomaly. It is a revelation.

It reveals what liberation theology has long argued: sin is social as well as personal. Structures can be sinful. Systems can crucify.

When poor defendants encounter swift prosecution while elite networks encounter delay, protection, and opacity, we are not witnessing isolated moral failure. We are witnessing two systems.

Sirach sets before us life and death. The death-dealing system is one where law bends upward. The life-giving system is one where law protects the vulnerable first:

“Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”
Blessed are those who refuse to equate legality with justice.
Blessed are those who demand that commandments function as protection for the powerless.
Blessed are those who see through the “wisdom” of powerful elites

Jesus did not abolish the commandments. He sharpened them until they pierced hypocrisy.

Before us remain fire and water. The question is not whether we personally avoid wrongdoing.

The question is whether we will accept a system where justice is negotiated by wealth — or insist that the law once again become what it was meant to be: protection and good news for the poor.

Dan Brown’s “Origin”: Asking the Wrong Question about Religious Violence

Sadly, my nearly year-long saga in Spain is coming to an end. Today is my last full day here. Since last September, my wife, Peggy, and I have shared a sabbatical with my daughter and son-in-law and their family of five children (ages 4 to 15). Right now we’re in Mallorca.

The whole experience has been life changing – almost as important as my study of liberation theology in Brazil (1984), my frequent visits to revolutionary and post-revolutionary Nicaragua (beginning in 1985), all those times I’ve visited Cuba (starting in 1997), and my years of study and teaching in Costa Rica (1992-2013).

In Spain I’ve learned more and changed more than I could ever have anticipated.

Unexpectedly, I’ve entered an unusual community here – of street musicians, cave dwellers, hippies, and grassroots philosophers. I love them all, and as I said, it’s changed my life.

One of them, Simon (from Chile) introduced me to the great Chilean film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and to Ana Rodriguez Sotomayor and her milestone book, The Precursors of Printing.

My troglodyte friend, Simon

Those sources and my desire to improve my Spanish comprehension sent me back (via YouTube) to my early teachers from Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico: Franz Hinkelammert (who died last week), Enrique Dussel, and (more recently) Ramon Grosfoguel. Together their drive to decolonize world history has rendered irrelevant my previous understandings (and teaching!) of Eurocentric universal history.

Simon and I also studied together the Mayan sacred book, The Popol Vuh. He introduced me to Tarot, marijuana, and mushrooms. At least once a week, we talked for hours.

Another dear friend, Francesco from Italy, showed me how to read tarot cards. Cesco’s a Bob Dylan scholar. My friend’s two long essays (in Italian) helped me appreciate Dylan more deeply and enthusiastically than ever.

That made my attendance at Dylan’s Granada concert (with my 15-year-old granddaughter, Eva Maria) richer than I could ever have imagined. Eva and I had an artistic experience that night (in the Alhambra) that neither of us will forget. It was magical.

Eva Maria & I pose before entering the Alhambra’s General Life

So, I found it somehow fitting that just a few days ago, with my time in Spain running out, it was Eva who suggested that I read Dan Brown’s novel, Origin. Her suggestion was inspired by connections she saw between my recently published essay on artificial intelligence (AI) on the one hand, and our frequent conversations about faith and religion, along with our shared experience of Spain itself on the other.

Origin is a 2017 “who dunnit” that involves the biblical Book of Genesis, science and evolution, Christian fundamentalism, and artificial intelligence. All of it is set in Spain and many of the places my family and I have visited over the last year.

I’m talking especially about Bilbao and its Guggenheim Museum and Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familia cathedral created by Antoni Gaudi. Involved too is what I’ve learned here about Spanish politics, the enduring power of the Spanish Catholic Church, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), the monarchy in Spain, and resistance to that apparently outmoded institution.

Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona

In short, Origin has Dan Brown’s perennial hero, Robert Langdon attempting to solve the murder of the brilliant futurist scholar, Edmund Kirsch. Kirsch claimed to have discovered definitive atheistic answers to religion’s two most persistent questions: (1) Where did we come from, and (2) where are we going?

Scholars from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam found Kirsch’s discoveries so threatening that the only solution to the problem he represented was to silence him permanently.

With the dastardly deed done, Langdon must locate the responsible forces.

Not surprisingly, doing so involves a stunningly beautiful heroine, several additional murders, frantic chases, and Brown’s usual long (sometimes pedantic) discourses on symbols, codes, architecture, history, mythology, science, and technology.

Also involved are long conversations with “Winston,” a computerized embodiment of the very artificial intelligence that my earlier-referenced essay had speculated might represent the next step in human evolution.

The whole thing was quite fascinating and even exciting from its opening interfaith exchanges to its cliffhanger conclusion.

Still however, the book’s central problem seemed somehow outdated. I found it difficult to imagine that in 2017 the “entire world” [actually, 250 million (of 8 billion) people with access to computers and iPhones] would still be interested in, much less threatened by long-resolved (or dismissed as irrelevant) questions of creationism vs. evolution explained in those pedantic screeds.

Except for a quickly shrinking cadre of Christian fundamentalists, that controversy was solved cinematically years ago by Spencer Tracy in “Inherit the Wind” (1960). Granted, the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) did garner fevered national attention at least in America. But that was almost a century ago.

Since then, we’ve had the death of God movement, John XIII‘s Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s pedophilia crisis, and the resulting general discrediting of organized religion that has all but emptied (Catholic) churches across the world. (Just go to Mass here in Spain on any given Sunday, and you’ll struggle to find anyone under 60 among the worshippers.)

Today (at least among Christians) only religious crazies (like bombers of abortion clinics) are willing to commit murder over differences about the Bible (in which btw, there’s no denunciation of abortion).

Yes, that’s true about questions of creationism vs. evolution, and believers who understand the Bible as:

A single divinely authored book with 73 chapters
Whose most important chapter is Genesis
Whose data conflicts with modern science
And whose meaning is confined to the personal sphere,
While supporting American patriotism
And “spiritual” questions
Of feeling good about oneself
And about life after death,
Punishment and reward
And an apocalyptic, God-willed
World destruction
As punishment for sin

To repeat: very few among Christians are willing to kill or die for such arcane beliefs.

But that’s not nearly so about the Bible and questions of social justice. Instead, as Noam Chomsky (a Jewish atheist) has shown, the U.S. government has shown itself quite willing to kill hundreds of thousands (including a whole team of liberation theologians in El Salvador in 1989) precisely over biblical interpretation that differs from that of the Christians whose irrelevant fundamentalism U.S. leadership approvingly identifies with Christianity.

On the other hand, the assassination-worthy theological enemies of the United States include those who ALONG WITH VIRTUALLY ALL OF MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP:

See the Bible as a library of books written by various authors in various historical periods for various reasons and from various theological (often conflicting) perspectives.
Within this canon, the Book of Genesis and its creation myths are peripheral,
While the Book of Exodus and Israel’s nation-founding story of the liberation of slaves from Egypt represents the Bible’s central focus
Reflecting ancient and modern conflicts between the world’s poor and its rich and powerful classes
Whose oppression of marginalized people stand in sharp contrast to the biblical God’s “preferential option for the poor,”
[And to “America’s” (and empires’ in general) preferential option for the rich],
While identifying the Book of Revelation’s “Apocalypse” as predicting not the end of the world, but the annihilation of the Roman Empire and (by extension) of empires in general.

With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder that Dan Brown chose a safer and less politically controversial approach to religious controversy than that pinpointed by Chomsky, biblical scholarship, and contemporary politics.

Instead, Brown chose to stick with worn out cliches and simplifications.

Regrettably, he steered far away from Chomsky’s advice: “Keep away from clichés, this world is much more complicated.”

So is faith and Sacred Scripture.

Anti-Colonial Decolonized Universal History (Part 2)

What if I told you that virtually everything you’ve been taught about European and American history is false? What if I said that far from leading human development in the fields of science, industry, culture, philosophy, and religion, Europeans and their American cousins have on a world scale been marginal and unoriginal?

What if you were told instead that African, Arab, Persian, Chinese, and indigenous peoples across the planet have demonstrated superior intelligence, more scientific originality, greater technological proficiency, and deeper spirituality than their western counterparts?

Well, believe it or not, those are the conclusions of critical thinkers in the Global South. As I pointed out in a recent posting, the latter are reconceptualizing and debunking Euro-Centric colonized history. In the process, they put Europeans and American “achievements” in their proper place as minor, derivative and ultimately destructive.

I’m referring to critical thinking specialists like Franz Hinkelammert of Costa Rica, Enrique Dussel of Argentina, and Ramon Grosfoguel of Puerto Rico. [The first (age, 91) is a colleague of mine; the second (age, 87) was my teacher in Brazil in 1984]. The work of all three centralize liberation theology.

Together with other Global South philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and theologians, they are inviting the rest of us to understand that the history we’ve been taught is narrow and misleading. It falsely presents as “universal” the historical experiences of nations and cultures that globally are of marginal importance at best. At worst, they are larcenous and plagiarist.

According to the thinkers I’m referencing, Eurocentric history has become universalized only because of its imposition on richer more original cultures through the militarized processes of imperial colonialism. All of us are its victims.

Euro-centric Fake History

For instance, westerners are taught that philosophy surfaced for the first time in “ancient” Greece six centuries before the dawn of the Common Era. It was only then that ideas of universal good, justice, and democracy came to be thought about in systematic ways.

None of that is true according to the thinkers referenced here. Philosophy and concern for universal values emerged not in Greece, but in the more ancient centers of learning located in Egypt, among African Bantu peoples, in ancient Babylon (modern Iraq), and eventually in China, India, as well as among Native Peoples in Abya Yala (the Americas). (The latter, by the way, were all immigrants from Asia. They brought with them their essentially Asian values.)

Take, for instance, the concept of justice. It was enshrined in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE). The latter defined justice as caring for widows, orphans, the poor, and immigrants. That is, justice centralized not one’s own spouse, but that of others; not one’s own child, but the abandoned children of others; not members of the royal household, but those without material resources; not one’s own people, but foreign residents. That understanding of the good was adopted a thousand years later by, for instance, the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, including the Jewish prophet Yeshua of Nazareth.

Anti-Colonial History

To counter western misconceptions, critical thinkers from the Global South paint a new anti-colonial and decolonized picture of humankind’s origins. It recognizes the African beginnings of homo sapiens (300,00 years ago) and its eastward movement from Africa with its Bantu and Egyptian cultures to the ancient cities of Babylon (modern Iraq) to Arabia, India, China, across the Bering Straits to Turtle Island and then southward all the way to Tierra del Fuego. To this ancient human migration, Europe and the Mediterranean cultures were comparative latecomers and quite marginal until about 140 years ago.

This of course runs counter to Eurocentric narratives like that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who found the roots of human culture in the Mediterranean, in 5^th century (BCE) Athens while denigrating Far Eastern cultures like China’s as infantile, prescientific, and morally deficient. In fact, however, the Mediterranean was nothing more than the center of a marginal (and comparatively inferior) culture.

By way of contrast, critical historians like Dussel point out that:

Egyptian philosophers anticipated the analysis, theories, and insights of Aristotle and Plato 3000 years before the latter’s’ celebrated writings.
Ancient Babylon (modern Iraq) represents one of the world’s oldest settlements. Bagdad is perhaps the most sacred city in world history – much more important than Rome, London, or Berlin. (It and its historical relics were absolutely destroyed by 21^st century barbarians and iconoclasts led by George W. Bush. According to Dussel, that destruction was a worse tragedy than would have been the levelling of all three European cities just mentioned.)
The “West” owes a huge debt of gratitude to Islamic science which was not inhibited by Roman Catholicism’s fundamentalism and anti-science dogma. As a result, during Christianity’s “dark ages,” Islam experienced a Golden Age that spread learning across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific and up into the Philippines. It’s no accident, for instance, that Europeans ended up using Arabic numbers. They were invented by Arabs in Bagdad, not in Paris. Moreover, Copernicus “discovered” what Islamic astronomers had known for 600 years. And the Pythagorean theorem was not invented by Pythagoras in Greece, but by Syrian scholars 1000 years earlier.
The Chinese had their own versions of the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution long before Europe’s. In fact, the Renaissance began in China. Already by 1463 Chinese scholars began translating Plato from Greek to Latin. Geniuses like Leonardo DaVinci depended heavily upon and even merely copied the insights already elaborated in Chinese tomes.
Chinese scholars had invented paper in the 6^th century CE, the printing press in the 8^th century, and paper money in the 9^th. (The printing press wasn’t “invented” in Europe until 1436.)
Already in 1434, a delegate from China appeared in the court of Eugenio IV in Florence with books presenting profound treatises on astronomy, agricultural tools, and military weapons.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was completely dependent on China for fine textiles such a silk. Kings and queens ate and drank from Chinese porcelain (“China”).
In 1870, China produced more steel than England and the United States combined. Chinese engineers traveled to Sheffield to teach industrialists there how to make steel.

Western Distortions

The West’s so-called Enlightenment specifically targeted the insights just cited as backward and belonging to “Dark Ages.” Enlightenment thinking sought a completely new beginning divorced from a “superstitious” past.

By the same token, it rejected Hammurabi’s Code as the product of an era superstitiously thought to be governed by gods and goddesses through their priests, temples, and cathedrals. All of that was eventually rejected as unenlightened.

Ironically, however, ancient religious ideas were merely swapped for more destructive modern ones. The gods of the Dark Ages were replaced by a new God called “Market” – a true fetish in the sense of “an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.”

Far from decreeing concern for widows and orphans, the poor and strangers, a fetishized Market demanded their rejection as unworthy and disposable. The Market god’s idea of justice continues to demand self-centeredness. Its “invisible hand” gives everyone their due even if it means their (deserved) destruction and that of the natural environment required to support life itself. The outworkings of market are final, infallible, and therefore beyond question.

According to Global South critical thinkers, it is that god and that theology that are responsible for modern “inquisitions,” wars, nuclear brinksmanship, mass extinctions, and environmental omnicide.

Conclusion

All of this means that:

American “exceptionalism” and its older European counterpart are true largely in the negative sense that both Europe and “America” were long excepted (absent) from the antecedent intellectual, industrial, and spiritual achievements of superior and more original cultures.
The “history” we’ve been taught is filled with lies and omissions. It is ideological in the sense that it has been fabricated to support economic, political, and social structures responsible for transferring knowledge and wealth from universal history’s most productive peoples who are not white Europeans. Rather, they are Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, Muslim Arabs, and the indigenous descendants of Asian migrants in Abya Yala.
Western insistence on “intellectual property” is disingenuous. For centuries, Europeans have appropriated (mostly without attribution) ideas and productive processes that have originated in much older cultures now accused of “stealing” what originated with them. In fact, ALL of the great “European” inventions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries (including the steam engine) were anticipated elsewhere.
In all of this, religion (far from irrelevant and transcended by secularism) has been and continues to be central. To begin with, the claim that God exclusively revealed himself (sic) to Europeans through institutions such as the Catholic Church (and later by Reformation national churches) delegitimized more ancient and more deeply spiritual traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Beyond that, capitalism with its fetishized Market God has been responsible for far more barbaric deaths than the much-maligned War Deity of the Old Testament.
The Chinese People’s Republic is no upstart. It’s “miracle” is no miracle. Instead, current developments represent a 6000-year-old cultural, industrial, and mercantile leader reassuming its accustomed place of world leadership.
Haitian filmmaker, Raoul Peck’s summary of European history’s three basic points is correct. He described them as (1) “Civilization” (i.e., white supremacy), (2) colonialism, and (3) extermination.

Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and the Teachings of the Hunchback, Paul of Tarsus

hunchback

This is my 4th blog entry connected with a course I’ve been taking in New York City for the past 7 weeks. The course is called “The Frankfurt School and the Paradoxical Idea of Progress: Thinking beyond Critical Theory.” It’s taught by the great critical theory scholar, Stanley Aronowitz and has been a great joy for me. I love the subject; my classmates are very smart, and Stanley is . . . well, Stanley. He’s provocative, delightfully quirky, and extremely sharp even after the stroke that (at his age of 85) has confined him to a wheelchair. It’s a great privilege studying with him. As you can see from my previous blogs here, here, here, and here, the course readings from Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin have been challenging. The ones analyzed below are equally so. This week, my responses are to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and to a brief essay from Walter Benjamin called “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

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Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and the Teachings of the Hunchback Paul of Tarsus

What is the basis of critical thinking? Is it rationality? Is it logic? No, it’s theology.

That, at least, is the implied argument of the critical theorists, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin. For them, the foundation of critical thought is what economist and liberation theologian, Franz Hinkelammert (the convener Costa Rica’s Critical Thinking Group) terms “the critique of mythic reason.” That is, the foundation of critical thought for Marcuse and Benjamin is myth involving interaction between human beings and the divine or ineffable transcendent. Marcuse’s preferred mythology is Greek. Benjamin suggests that his derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and from St. Paul in particular.

The purpose of what follows is to summarize and offer some brief commentary on the relevant arguments of both Marcuse and Benjamin. To do so, this essay will first of all place Marcuse’s use of mythology within the context of his more general argument as outlined in his Eros and Civilization. Marcuse’s thought will then be compared with that of Walter Benjamin as expressed in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” with each Benjamin’s highly poetic 18 theses “translated” into more straight-forward prose. The essay will conclude by arguing that Benjamin’s theological approach is more effective than Marcuse’s in terms of critical theory. It will add, however, that Benjamin’s use of the Judeo-Christian tradition stops short of the depth achieved by Hinkelammert’s commentary informed by the theology of liberation – and in particular by Hinkelammert’s analysis of the writings of Paul of Tarsus whose thought he identifies as the root of what has come to be known as critical theory.

Eros and Civilization

Herbert Marcuse’s seminal Eros and Civilization attempts to elaborate the critical implications of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (245). In doing so, it builds on the model of repression so brilliantly explained by Freud in his own Civilization and its Discontents. Marcuse connects Freud’s theory of the inevitable conflict between civilization and its laws on the one hand, and the fundamental human drive for complete happiness on the other.

With Freud, Marcuse identifies that drive with the Greek word Eros understood on his view, as much more expansive than mere sexual love (205). In doing so, Marcuse acknowledges the term’s mythological roots. Even more, Christian theologians might find theological overtones in his use of Eros which arguably makes the drive for complete happiness equivalent to “God” as described by the author of the Christian Testament’s First Letter of John which identifies God with love itself (I JN 4:7-21).

In the process of stating his argument, Marcuse critically reviews the stages of human development shared by all human beings from birth, through early family life, education, employment, marriage, later family life, and death.

Marcuse notes that throughout those stages, humans gradually internalize restrictions on the self-centered drives (especially sexual) common to all humans. Such restrictions are necessary for the ordering of human community that avoids Hobbes war of each against all. Nevertheless, Marcuse finds that the social control required for such order soon develops into “surplus repression” far beyond that required for rational order (35, 37, 87f, 131, 235).

In the light of that reality, Marcuse’s overriding question becomes how to identify and escape excessive control that ends up serving the interests of dominant few, while immiserating all others. The chief misery imposed by those classes is that of alienated labor which requires that humans spend most of their lives performing (and recovering from) mind-numbing and body-destroying activities that have little or no intrinsic value (45).

Again, in order to answer his question about exiting this situation, Marcuse traces the origins of surplus repression. It begins, of course, in the family with a child’s relationship to his parents, especially (in the west’s patriarchal culture) with one’s relationship to father. Following the pattern of Freud’s myth of the primal horde, male children begin their lives confronted with a father who unreasonably imposes surplus repression upon them. His excessive demands cause rebellion paralleling that described in the Primal Horde myth (15). However, in most cases, rather than actually murdering the father, rebellion usually takes the form of sexual deviation from patriarchal restrictions.

Deviation from sexual restrictions is especially important, because (in the words of Erich Fromm) “Sexuality offers one of the most elemental and strongest possibilities of gratification and happiness.” Moreover, “. . . the fulfillment of this one fundamental possibility of happiness” of necessity leads to “an increase in the claim for gratification and happiness in other spheres of the human existence” (243). In other words, the human sexual drive represents the spearhead of Eros, the fundamental life force. That basic drive, Marcuse argues, lurks at the heart of all rebellion against civilization’s super-repression.

Eros differs from sexuality in that it is far less focused on genitalia (205). Even more, it locates its contested terrain on the fields of myth, art, philosophy, liberating education, and play.
Play proves especially important for Marcuse, because (in contradiction to society’s demands for productivity – and its “performance principle” expressed in alienated labor) “play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitative traits of labor and leisure” (195). It manifests existence without anxiety or compulsion and thus incarnates human freedom (187).

As noted earlier, the repressed human drive towards such liberation finds expression in philosophy, art, folklore, fairy tales, phantasy, and myth. Marcuse finds the latter especially expressive in the cases of Orpheus, Dionysius, Prometheus, Narcissus, Pandora. Accordingly, he devotes two entire chapters (8 &9) to analysis of Greek mythology. Myths provide instances of phantasy’s expression that “speaks the language of the pleasure principle, of freedom from repression, of uninhibited desire and gratification” (142).

Nevertheless, phantasies based on Greek mythology, though preserving the truth of “The Great Refusal” (to be entirely controlled by alienated labor), remain according to Marcuse’s analysis, “entirely inconsequential” in terms of actual resolving the problem in question (160).

In other words, while Marcuse focuses on a divine Eros in a promising way, he throws up his hands regarding the question of how to talk about its liberating reality to those for whom the very Greek mythology he finds so meaningful lacks resonance. He similarly characterizes folklore, fairytale, literature and art as also insignificant in terms of yielding a reality principle that realistically provides liberation from the “surplus repression” of the one that prevails (160).

This leads to the question: if Greek mythology is so ineffective, then why spend two chapters on the subject? Why did not Marcuse instead explore the liberating dimensions of the mythology of the Judeo-Christian tradition with which so many in the West can indeed identify? It might even be said that for the 75% of “Americans” who identify as Christian, their religious tradition amounts to a kind of underlying popular philosophy that supplies meaning for their lives. Therefore, finding and describing connections between that tradition and liberation from surplus repression would hardly be “inconsequential.”

Clearly, Marcuse was aware of such possibilities. His friend and Frankfurt School colleague, Erich Fromm, had already identified them in his The Dogma of Christ also published (like Eros and Civilization) in 1955. Moreover, Marcuse himself references such possibilities in Eros and Civilization, although he doesn’t elaborate the allusion. There, he observes:

“The message of the Son was the message of liberation: the overthrow of the Law (which is domination) by Agape (which is Eros). That would fit in with the heretical image of Jesus as the Redeemer in the flesh, the Messiah who came to save man here on earth. Then the subsequent transubstantiation of the Messiah, the deification of the Son beside the Father would be a betrayal of his message by his own disciples – the denial of the liberation in the flesh, the revenge on the redeemer. Christianity would then have surrendered the gospel of Agape-Eros again to the Law . . .” (69-73)

Here Marcuse introduces a crucial distinction between the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth on the one hand and his “transubstantiation” from a human being into the very equal of God. Beforehand, Marcuse says, Jesus was actually a heretic, an earthly Messiah intent on liberating actually existing human beings from oppressive legal systems. His followers, however gradually transformed his liberating Gospel of Agape-Eros into an instrument enforcing a super-repressive Law.

Having opened this promising door of critical analysis, Marcuse unexplainedly leaves it ajar without pursuing its promise.

Benjamin’s 18 Theses

In his final entry in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, a collection of Walter Benjamin’s works reflecting his work as a critical theorist, Walter Benjamin ventures into the realm of Judeo-Christian theology that Marcuse so carefully avoids. Benjamin does so in the context of offering a series of eighteen theses on historical materialism and its philosophy of history. By the way, I take “historical materialism” to mean the philosophical conclusion holding that historical experience creates ideas rather than ideas creating historical experience.

Following this conclusion, Benjamin presents a highly contextualized approach to history wherein each of the latter’s moments is shaped by all previous ones as well as by prevailing ideologies and the historian’s own experience of life.

In other words, the writing of history is not simply a matter of recording events that unfolded in time understood as homogenous and empty of cultural influences and repercussions from what came before. Neither is it merely a matter of recording the past for the sake of preserving disconnected memories. Rather, historiography has the social purpose of shedding light on present dangers and crises for purposes of discovering exits from such existential threats.

Crucially for Benjamin (as already indicated), historical method is not only materialistic in the sense just referenced; it is also highly theological. As we shall see, Benjamin’s very first thesis in his list of 18 makes this point by suggesting Pauline theology as the guiding force of critical thought. Subsequently, virtually every thesis in the author’s list contains some reference to elements such as: theology itself (253), redemption, Messianic power, Judgment Day, the kingdom of God, spiritual things (254), good tidings, the Messiah, redeemer, Antichrist (255), theologians (256), angels, Paradise (257), monastic discipline, friars, meditation, Protestant ethics (258), savior (259), mysticism (261), Messianic time (263), the Torah, and prayer (264).

Moreover, like medieval religious practice, Benjamin’s theses are intended to turn the attention of readers away from the world and its affairs – but this time as described by traitorous politicians entrapped by a stubborn belief in the religion of progress (258). In fact, given Benjamin’s theological interests (4, 253) it is easy to interpret his theses on the philosophy of history as attempts to reinterpret theology in the service of historical materialism.

All of this may become evident in the following summaries of each our author’s 18 theses:

Thesis I: In an atmosphere of smoke and mirrors, and guided by theology, critical thought in the form of historical materialism promises inevitable victory over its opponent – viz. automated technology. And this, despite the latter’s deceptions that distort and reverse perception of reality into its mirror-opposite.

Thesis II: Historical materialists agree that Past (lost opportunities), Present (attempts to reverse those losses) and future (refusal to deal with the consequences of present action) exist in dynamic dialectical relationship captured by the words of history, redemption, and envy.

Thesis III: It is true that no event is insignificant in the long course of history. However, the significance of particular events can only be known at history’s conclusion.

Thesis IV: Despite apparent setbacks in workers’ struggles against ruling class domination, the long arc of history bends towards the victory of the poor and oppressed, because their subtle courage, humor, cunning and fortitude are more powerful than the gross tools of their oppressors.

Thesis V: Historical materialists (vs. mere chroniclers of past events) realize that recollection of past events is valuable only insofar as those events relate to and illuminate the present.

Thesis VI: The threats represented by ruling class attempts to reduce traditions about the past to tools supporting conformism must be resisted so that the past’s recollection might serve resistance and liberation instead.

Thesis VII: Historians who recount history without connecting it to present existential threats serve the interests of the world’s rulers (past and present) who steal the spirit and artifacts of those they’ve subdued. Historical materialists swim against that current.

Thesis VIII: History must reflect the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” which makes us aware of the changes necessary to overcome the perennial state of danger that has always characterized human existence and its struggle against oppression, which even its opponents treat as inevitable.

Thesis IX: As history’s messengers (angels), historical materialists perceive “progress” as responsible for an unending series of catastrophes. Ironically however, the devastating power of those very calamities prevents historical materialists from successfully alerting audiences to their own loss and lack of perception.

Thesis X: The accepted understanding of history (as a detached chronicling of the past) only serves traitorous politicians who have surrendered to fascism with its uncritical belief in progress, its manipulation of the masses, and its totalitarian structures.

Thesis XI: The conformity of the German working class is grounded in the conviction that “progress” includes and benefits its members. Alienated and enslaving factory work has been dignified by this belief. However, contrary to the convictions of “vulgar Marxism,” technology need not destroy, but could actually enhance and make nature more fruitful.

Thesis XII: It is angry recollection of the past rather than concern for the future and future generations that inspires resistance and rebellion in the working class which is the real repository of meaningful history.

Thesis XIII: Any valid critique of the Social-Democratic concept of progress (as anthropocentric, boundless, and irresistible) must be context-based rather than ignorant of historical context – as is the common Social-Democratic understanding of history.

Thesis XIV: Since only the present moment (the mystical nunc stans) is real, any consideration of the past has value only insofar as it sheds light on the present always characterized by ruling-class domination.

Thesis XV: Revolutionary holidays stop the ongoing continuum of history at decisive junctures – eternalizing the moment of liberation like the clocks simultaneously stopped by bullets on the first evening of fighting in the French Revolution, July 1789.

Thesis XVI: In contrast to historicists, historical materialists experience the present not as a transition to the future, but as an end in itself shaped by past events.

Thesis XVII: Unlike historicism, materialist historiography is not merely additive and does not treat time as homogenous, empty and inexorably in motion. The materialist approach is more contemplative, since it allows thinking (and therefore time) to stop so that history’s flow might be perceived as a unified whole. This pause and perception enables the historian (and his audience) to identify history’s underlying oppression and to uncover openings (past and present) for revolutionary change as the overriding project of one’s life.

Thesis XVIII: Humankind’s 50,000-year stature in a 14 million-year-old universe is nearly insignificant. As a result: (A) Alleging causal connections between historical events remains highly speculative (though any given present is both influenced by the past and contains intimations of a salvific future) and (B) the Jewish concept of time (as fundamental openness to a better future) is helpful here, since it is neither empty nor homogenous, nor magical.

Franz Hinkelammert’s Reading of Benjamin

Analyzing the story recounted in Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history, liberation theologian, Franz Hinkelammert specifically connects Benjamin with Paul of Tarsus and with critical theory. In doing so, Hinkelammert advances the theory of this brief review, viz. that theology constitutes the foundation of critical theory.

In fact, Hinkelammert considers Paul as the West’s first critical thinker. As such, Paul’s thinking, Hinkelammert argues, anticipates critical theory’s historical materialism, universalism, anarchism, and identification of the messianic function of the world’s poor and oppressed (Hinkelammert: La malidicion que pesa sobre la ley: Las raices del pensamiento critico en Pablo de Tarso. Editorial Arlekin. San Jose, Costa Rica, 2010. 16). More specifically, Hinkelammert recognizes the apostle as the hunchback pulling the strings of the puppet (historical materialism) in Benjamin’s cryptic parable (pictured above) recounted in the opening lines of “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Hinkelammert justifies doing so on the basis of the following observations:

• By his own admission, Benjamin’s basic orientation was decidedly towards the biblical past.
• He lamented that the biblical “wizened” founders of modern thought remained hidden and out-of-sight (Benjamin 253, Hinkelammert 23).
• In one of Benjamin’s surviving fragments, the latter’s closest friend, Gershom Scholem, celebrated Paul as the most notable example of a revolutionary Jewish mystic (Hinkelammert 14).
• Like the hunchback in Benjamin’s story, Paul suffered from some kind of physical deformity as described in II COR 12:7-9.
• Benjamin description of the parable’s puppet as wearing “Turkish attire” reminds us that its hidden alleged puppet-master, St. Paul, came specifically from Tarsus which is located in modern day Turkey (Hinkelammert 15).
• Other commentators like Jacob Taubes have found the presence of Paul’s thinking prominent not only in Benjamin, but in the most important currents of modern thought including that of Freud and Nietzsche. (The latter by the way, signaled support for this review’s thesis by villainizing Paul for the apostle’s anarchism, defense of the poor and oppressed, and prefiguration of Marx and of historical materialism) (16).
• Above all, Paul’s criticism of Law as the sin of the world, prepared the way for critical theory’s criticism of market law and of the state as the armed force imposing the will of the ruling class on the oppressed majority (17). For both Paul and critical theorists, complying with an oppressive law remains completely immoral (18).

Conclusion

Tellingly for this review’s thesis – that theology is the basis of critical theory – Hinkelammert points out that after Benjamin’s suicide in 1940, his fragment “Capitalism as Religion” came to light. The fragment drew a direct line from orthodox Christianity to capitalism whose system and ideology, Benjamin argues, replicates point-by-point (in secular terms) the elements of medieval Catholic orthodoxy.

However, according to Hinkelammert, Benjamin failed to note, much less exploit, the critical difference between such orthodoxy and the original message and praxis of the thoroughly Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. Had he done so, Hinkelammert observes, Benjamin would have strengthened his conclusion about the connections between Paul and historical materialism, since the teachings of St. Paul followed so closely those of the radical prophet and mystic Jesus of Nazareth.

In the end, it is Paul’s critique Law as well as the apostle’s anarchism and defense of the poor that prefigures the elaborations of Marx and Freud as understood by critical thinkers Benjamin and Marcuse. Only by embracing Paul’s influence, Benjamin correctly observes, can historical materialism claim its assured destiny as victor over the technological automaton intent on destroying us all.

Contemporary critical thinkers and activists would do well to heed Benjamin’s advice. They would do well to join liberation theologians in exploiting the popular power of a reinterpreted Judeo-Christian tradition that supports subversion, anarchism, and the hermeneutical privilege of the poor.

My Experience in Zimbabwe (14th in a series on critical thinking)

Zimbabwe

So far in this series, I’ve been trying to trace my personal development from ethnocentrism to world-centrism. The tracing has had me recalling leaving home for the seminary at the age of 14, then traveling to Rome for 5 years following my ordination in 1966. From there I spent a year working for the Christian Appalachian Project in Kentucky, and then decided to leave the priesthood. I subsequently began my 40 year career of teaching at Berea College. My first sabbatical in 1984 took me to Brazil; that was followed by language study in Nicaragua, some teaching in Costa Rica, where I also worked in a liberation theology think tank, and then several trips to Cuba. In this posting I tell of a mind-expanding six months in Zimbabwe — my first time in Africa.

Fresh from my first trip to Cuba, my family and I spent 1997-’98 in Zimbabwe – this time accompanying my wife, Peggy, who had received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in the capital city at the university in Harare. In terms of critical thinking, our experience in Zimbabwe helped me further reflect on the importance of Franz Hinkelammert’s observation about the centrality of utopian concepts in critical thinking. Zimbabwe embodied a problem that must be faced by any critical thinker in the mold of what this series intends to explore: Which utopia is a better guideline for structuring a just society – a world with room for everyone, or a market free of government regulation?

That is, if Cuba demonstrated utopian commitment to Hinkelammert’s capacious world, Zimbabwe revealed what typically happens when socialism’s goals are dropped in favor of capitalism’s utopia. Let me share with you my personal experience in the former Rhodesia, for it provides a case study in systemic critical thinking about the way social problems can implicate us all.

To begin with, the Zimbabwe my family discovered in 1997, had experienced the triumph of its bloody socialist revolution in 1980 under the leadership of ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union). After its triumph, and unlike Cuba, ZANU was very cautious in the socio-economic reforms it implemented. True, ZANU established as its goal economic “growth with equity.” And towards that end, its policies followed the Cuban model through programs of modest land redistribution, as well as emphasizing education, health care, higher wages, and food subsidies. This required large government programs and expenditures. In those early days, ZANU devoted approximately 50% of its annual budget to such endeavors. These reforms succeeded in significantly raising living standards for the country’s overwhelmingly black and poor majority. After years of apartheid, they were finally experiencing living room.

However, from the outset, ZANU chose not to institute truly comprehensive land reform to aggressively redistribute white-owned acreage to poor black farmers. Instead, it left 70% of the country’s productive capacity in the hands of the former Rhodesia’s white settler class and under the control of foreign corporations.

Then in 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had supported socialist revolutions everywhere, Zimbabwe, like Cuba, lost a role model as well as a major source of foreign aid. Socialism seemed entirely discredited. So like other socialist countries, Zimbabwe found itself at a crossroads. Its question was that of every socialist country at the time: Should we continue on the socialist path or admit defeat and surrender to the apparent inevitability of capitalism?

Whereas Cuba, despite overwhelming pressure from its virulently hostile North American neighbor, chose to remain with socialism, Zimbabwe decided otherwise. Acceding to the recommendations of the United States and the International Monetary Fund, the country embraced capitalism and drastically restructured its economy. It lowered taxes on local (usually white) commercial famers as well on foreign investors. It cut back on social programs, lowered wages, and devalued its currency. The idea was to create in Zimbabwe an investment climate attractive to multi-national corporations, whose wealth would finance jobs and trickle down to the country’s poor masses.

When our family arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997, the effects of such counter-revolutionary reforms were visible everywhere. On the one hand, Harare seemed to exude prosperity. Downtown streets were broad, clean, jammed with traffic during rush hours, and largely absent of the beggars, homeless, prostitutes and street children we had encountered elsewhere in our travels.

The apparent prosperity was commercial too. Stores in Zimbabwe’s capital were modern, clean and well-stocked with items from all over the world. The East Gate Shopping Center was a monument to it all. Standing at the corner of Second Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue, it was a block square mall five stories high. Entering this darkened underworld from the sun-drenched pavement outside, patrons were suddenly transported from steaming Third World Africa to very cool and exotic locations resembling Paris, São Paulo, or New York. The transition was a day to night experience. In the mall the hour was always post meridian, brightened by shop lights, garish neon signs or by commercial manifestos with the same light-bulbed borders otherwise reserved for backstage Hollywood dressing rooms. Four sets of glass-enclosed, stainless steel elevators whisked shoppers and office workers to their respective destinations. The layers of overhead walkways were constructed of dark green girders, pipes, tubes and mesh floors all made of hard, cold steel. The appearance of complex, unending scaffolding and catwalks gave reluctant testimony to the unfinished impermanence of the New World Order congealed in the mall’s defiantly postmodern architecture. At the same time, though, the formation trumpeted the fact that Zimbabwe was part of it all. East Gate housed thoroughly up-to-date clothing shops, shoe boutiques, candy and liquor stores, pharmacies, beauty parlors, sporting goods outlets, and food courts.

It all stood in sharp contrast to Cuba. During this same historical period, after losing overnight 70% of its (Soviet) trading partners, the island found itself plunged into a decade-long depression far worse than anything Americans had experienced after the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Survivors of the “special period” recalled that the average Cuban adult probably lost about 20 pounds. A sociologist told me “We all looked like those pictures of World War II concentration camp internees.” Yet astoundingly in Cuba, not a single school or hospital closed, and unlike European countries after socialism’s demise, there were no riots in the street, much less any counter-revolution.

Yes, Cuba was apparently miserable under socialism, while Zimbabwe prospered under its new allegiance to capitalism. But was the difference merely apparent? My personal observation and experience with Zimbabwe’s working class and maid system made me wonder. Both showed the country’s underbelly where the vast majority lived in distressing poverty that (in contrast to Cuba) remains to this day.

Anyone could see the distress each morning. Beginning at sunup, around 5:30, a long procession of tan mini-buses transported to the city center waves of black workers from their shacks in the “populous suburbs” that had little to do with East Gate prosperity. Life there was like living in the favelas we experienced in Sao Paolo and Recife. As the vehicles arrived one after another, the waves crashed together to form a turbulent sea of humanity walking, jogging, running, frowning and chattering along streets like Alexandra Park’s Barrowdale Road.

Dressed in heavy wool sweaters and toboggan watch caps of navy, sky blue, red or black, machine operators, plant janitors, maids, gardeners and factotums hurried to assume duties in the industrial centers, or in the homes of well-off whites who meanwhile breakfasted securely behind well-locked gates invariably patrolled by huge fierce dogs. The wealth disparity between blacks and whites was there for all to see.

Each morning innumerable underpaid and overworked maids bravely made their ways from the Chitungwiza slum to Alexandra Park and other white sections of Harare. It was the same “maid systems” we had encountered in Brazil and throughout Central America. Actually, I realized, it’s a step below slavery. At least in the slave system, owners had to provide food, shelter, clothing and health care for their workers and offspring. With capitalism and the “maid system,” the master class could wash its hands of such concerns, pay a pittance, and leave the maids to figure out how to take care of their children and make ends meets.

Yet I have to admit that in Zimbabwe, we found ourselves cooperating with that very system. And using maids made us complicit in the exploitation of workers throughout the Third World. The wage we paid our maid was the same Nike workers received in Taiwan — $1.50 a day. The hours she worked were as long as theirs — twelve. The ideological justification for not providing higher pay was identical as well. “We know the wages are terribly low,” employers everywhere in the world have said from time immemorial. “But if forced to pay more, we’d have to go without employing these people at all; we simply couldn’t afford them. As a result, they’d be laid off and have no income. At least under the current arrangement, they have some money coming in. Moreover, if as an individual, I could afford to pay more, it wouldn’t be fair to other employers who might not be able to do so. It would just create tension between them and the maids they’ve hired. We’re trapped in a system without a just alternative.”

This is the sort of contradiction Zimbabwe revealed to me – including in our own lives. So who was better off, Zimbabweans or Cubans? Which country made the better choice? Whose utopia is preferable? And should our family have cooperated with the one Zimbabwe’s governing elite chose? Answering questions like those reveal the essence of the critical thinking recommended here. What do you think?

Peggy & I Study with Franz Hinkelammert in Costa Rica (12th in Series on Critical Thinking)

Franz & Peggy

The next stop on the critical thinking odyssey I’m outlining here was Costa Rica. There I finally met Franz Hinkelammert, whose Global South approach to critical thinking provided the theory I sought to make everything I had learned in Brazil come together. Recall that I had encountered his latest work while in Brazil. (Franz is pictured above with Peggy and me in 1992.)

Franz Hinkelammert is a German economist and theologian. After coming to Latin America in 1976, he lived and worked mostly in Chile. But then the 1973 U.S.-sponsored coup removed the democratically-elected Socialist president of the country (Salvador Allende). The subsequent installation of a brutal dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, made Chile extremely dangerous for people like Hinkelammert. So he fled to Costa Rica, where he, liberation theologian giant, Hugo Assmann and biblical scholar, Pablo Richard founded the Department of Ecumenical Research (DEI), a liberation theology think tank. The DEI specialized in preparing grassroots organizers to work for social change throughout Latin America. However, its emphasis was not on “training” for activism, but specifically on analysis and critical thought.

My opportunity to study with Franz came with my second sabbatical in 1992. Peggy and I applied and were accepted as the first North American participants in the DEI’s annual Workshop for Invited Researchers. The eight-week course hosted about 20 scholars from across Latin America. Each of us had a research project whose goal was publication in the DEI’s quarterly, Pasos. Not surprisingly, mine was on critical thinking.

During the workshop, Franz, Pablo Richard, and fellow Chilean, Helio Gallardo were the principal presenters and discussion leaders. In his own lectures, Franz emphasized what is for him an enduring key idea about critical thinking. It is expressed most clearly in his Critique of Utopic Reason and also in his Critique of Mythic Reason. In both, he highlighted the essentially utopian nature of critical thought. Its point, he says, is not simply to analyze arguments for logical fallacies. Instead, it is political. It is essentially utopian – to create a better world by imagining the best possible world. Hinkelammert’s argument runs as follows:

If politics is the art of the possible,
Then a utopian idea of the impossible, but at the same time desirable, is required
Not necessarily as a goal to be implemented
But as a “North Star”
Guiding critical thought and action towards what indeed can be practically accomplished.
No such goal can be arrived at without utopian ideas towards which critical thinking gestures.
Utopian thought comes naturally to human beings.
In fact, critical thought without utopian concepts is itself unconsciously utopian.

Franz illustrates his idea by pointing out that utopias are not at all merely the province of starry-eyed idealists. They are essential for any critical thought intent on beneficial social change. In that sense, Franz’s own North Star for critical thought is the simple idea later articulated by the Zapatista rebels in Mexico as a world with room for everyone. Meanwhile, the capitalist utopian ideal is of a completely free market governed only by Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.” That is the guiding constellation under whose direction all mainstream economic theory is fabricated.

Hinkelammert’s argument highlights the difference I’ve been trying to describe between critical thinking as taught in the United States and what I discovered in the Global South. In the Global South, critical thinking is concerned with the big picture – with entire systems, with social analysis of economic and political structures. As explained by Franz and others, it is by no means a matter ferreting out what is now called “alternative facts” or “fake news.” Such concern glosses over the lies embedded in the very parameters of perception which act as blinders for both students and their teachers. In that sense, the critical thinking I had become used to had been literally partial in its ignorance and denial of the experience of the world’s majority who live in the former colonies. From that viewpoint concentrating on logical inconsistencies or falsehoods in arguments divorced from the unexamined socio-economic matrix of capitalism only serves to normalize what should be completely unacceptable to human beings.

For Hinkelammert, that was the insight of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. Marx in particular was a humanist who saw critical thought as focusing on human emancipation from the chains imposed by capitalism and the colonialism on which it depended. Critical thinking, in Marx’s estimation, involved identifying those chains and the steps necessary to humanize all relationships between persons and with nature itself. In theological terms, the mandate is: “Do what God did; become a human being!” That is the project of the type of critical thinking I was now encountering.

That, in fact, became what I subsequently attempted to communicate my students. And I began right there in San Jose. There, by mere coincidence and chance, I began teaching in a Latin American Studies Program (LASP). It was a term abroad for Evangelical students from the United States whose institutions were affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Teaching fundamentalist Evangelicals about colonialism, U.S. intervention in the Third World, and the history of capitalism was a wonderful challenge. Even more so was helping them understand liberation theology.

We clashed, especially at the beginning of our semester-long encounters. And (in terms of the topic at hand) that was because I was coming from the world-centric perspective of liberation theology, while their standpoint was almost exclusively ethnocentric. For them, the United States could do no wrong, and the Bible was to be taken at face value. To criticize the U.S. or to interpret parts of the Bible as myth, legend, or poetry was simply unacceptable.

I, on the other hand, owned the world-centric approach I’m describing here. I took to heart international polls that consistently identified the United States as the greatest threat to world peace.[1] Moreover, my approach to the Bible was informed by the historical critical methodology of modern scripture scholarship.[2]

Such challenges however were mitigated by the reality check the LASP program provided each semester’s cadre of students. I’m referring to four days among the descendants of African slaves in Limon on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, as well as two weeks each in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Cuba. In each of those cases, we more or less followed the practice I had experienced in Nicaragua. In the midst of their studies, students lived with local families and received on-site presentations from indigenous tribal leaders, union organizers, politicians, historians, and church officials – most of whom were not ethno-centrists. Students uniformly described it all as life-transforming. And I’m sure that direct contact with the victims of what bell hooks calls “white-supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy” made them more thoughtful about their reactions to world-centric perspectives.

Additionally, at least for me, those LASP trips – especially to Cuba – provided opportunities to observe and judge attempts to implement what Hinkelammert would call critical utopian theory.

(Next week: My learnings in Cuba)

[1] Bennett-Smith, Meredith. “Womp! This Country Was Named the Greatest Threat to World Peace.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 02 Jan. 2014. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.

[2] “What Is the Historical-Critical Method?” The Historical-Critical Method. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.