I’ve been working on a book off and on for the last year or so. The working title is Renewing the Conservative Imagination. My thesis is that our age is defined by an antinomian conviction. If we will but be free from moral norms, then we will be happy. Put differently, our age is Bohemian. Transgression liberates us the magical power of inherited moral norms (Bourgeois culture). “Difference” delivers us from “logocentrism,” and so forth.
As part of this project I recently read George Bernard Shaw’s little book on Ibsen, The Quintessence Of Ibsen. The first three chapters provide a wonderfully Shavian (that is to say entertaining and potted) account of the antinomian dream, a fitting introduction to Ibsen’s plays, which more often than not make the voice of duty into the villian—and the woman who breaks free and transgresses social norms into the heroine.
Shaw envisions a time when “the tyranny of duty perishes.” This will happen when we enter into an age in which we feel a duty only to ourselves. Living for ourselves, we will be satisfied, and no longer stretched anxiously across old notions of good and evil, we will become more open, accepting, and authentic.
Shaw’s reasoning is straightforward. All duty is a restriction of the will, and thus it perverts and distorts the natural integrity of our humanity. The key to a healthy society is healthy citizens. Therefore we need to throw off the shackles of morality, and we will have healthy citizens and thus a healthy society.
But this age of freedom, Shaw recognizes, will not come automatically. Figures such as Ibsen play an important role, because the movement beyond right and wrong to natural expressions of honest desires meets with anxious resistance (the dreaded bourgeois!). “The evangelist of this last step,” Shaw concludes, “must therefore preach the repudiation of duty.” Salvation by transgression alone!
The true servant of humanity teaches us that all our inherited ideals of self-sacrifice and duty are so much bunk. As Shaw puts it: “The destroyer of ideals [by which Shaw means duty], though denounced as an enemy of society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies.” No more hypocrisy! Finally, the freedom to just live!
When I put down Shaw’s book, I found myself chuckling as I thought to myself, “Well, well, the doctrine of salvation by transgression has a fairly well established tradition. Heresy is our modern orthodoxy.”
Thus the great challenge for the conservative imagination: to envision the way in which obedience humanizes. Not easy. But perhaps made easier by the fact that transgression has become such a cliché.
January 3rd, 2011 | 6:21 pm
Please keep going. Such works are much needed.
These comments really struck hard: “If we will but be free from moral norms, then we will be happy” and “the antinomian dream…which more often than not make[s] the voice of duty into the villian.”
For decades, I have heard evangelical Christians, both in the pew and in the pulpit, make ‘duty’ into a villain.
In the face of the antinomian onslaught, conservatives have blindly gone on fighting, primarily, legalism. After all you can’t be happy obeying the law.
My book Love, Prayer and Forgiveness: When Basics Become Heresies, addresses some of your concerns. See comments on amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/y9p4vez
The first chapter is “Love and Obedience.” I would be glad to send you the book pdf.
January 3rd, 2011 | 8:11 pm
Transgression has become a cliche because it has succeeded. One need no longer actively rebel against such ideas as duty and obedience, it is sufficient to merely ignore them. The concepts themselves have been rendered powerless. One simply does not even consider the possibility of obedience in our culture unless at the point of a gun. And duty? Duty to what? There is nothing out there that has a legitimate claim any longer for the idea of duty to even have a meaning with the possible exception of one’s loved ones.
But outside that narrow circle, nothing matters. And because nothing matters, it is impossible for anything to make any value claim because such claims will have the same cumulative effect as water on the back of a duck.
January 3rd, 2011 | 9:49 pm
Two things strike me about this discussion. First, I wonder if the antinomian move here is more of a response to Kant’s categorical imperative than Christian legalism. All of that discussion of duty and obligation sounds a lot more Kantian to me than Christian. Second, it seems to me that Christian monasticism, particularly its Benedictine expressions, provides a Christian response that shows how obedience actually makes room for human freedom. The Rule of St. Benedict is clear that when we are slaves to our own wills freedom is actually repressed. And the Benedictine life has the benefit of being even more subversive than the supposed Bohemian life, which is really dependent upon and parasitic upon the bourgeois life.
January 3rd, 2011 | 9:56 pm
Sadly, I think that the titles which might have proven more apt have already been taken, by Oswald Spengler and Chinua Achebe.
January 3rd, 2011 | 11:16 pm
Rusty,
I’m afraid the antinomian impulse is only true when we look at our own actions. Nobody is antinomian when looking at the actions of others, however. I owe myself only authenticity, but you owe me fairness, justice, equity, respect!
An impossible contradiction, I grant you, but the one modern society inhabits. Consider “moralistic therapeutic deism” more closely. I think the best answer to the paradox lies in wrestling with this insight from Christian Smith.
Darel
January 3rd, 2011 | 11:59 pm
Can you give an example of how transgression has become a cliche?
January 4th, 2011 | 12:45 am
Your thesis may just be one of those hobgoblins of the socially conservative mind.
We ought to distinguish this supposed “antinomian conviction” and the conviction that traditional norms may need to be revised. One shouldn’t just suppose those who reject conservative sexual norms (for example) are doing so because of some “antinomian dream.” Very often, the rejection of a given norm is really just a revision, and the revision is itself often motivated by a perceived moral necessity. A case in point is the contemporary rejection of conservative attitudes towards gays and lesbians.
January 4th, 2011 | 7:02 am
If I recall correctly, it was Robert Benne, speaking at a Society of the Holy Trinity retreat, who used the term autonomianism, which would explain Darel’s seeming paradox.
January 4th, 2011 | 7:06 am
But, of course, the “Will to Law” is among the strongest of our desires, as all human history testifies. After all, as Lacordaire has it, “Between the weak and the strong, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free.”
January 4th, 2011 | 11:48 am
[...] January 4, 2011 in Uncategorized Jumping off of this post… [...]
January 4th, 2011 | 11:48 am
A very interesting post. One of our local editorialists had a good column with some connected ideas on Sunday:
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/112686864.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU
I myself am starting a blog series on this issue, as it affects the church, from a serious Lutheran perspective. I am not a pastor, but I am challenging pastors here…:
http://infanttheology.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/we-are-all-antinomians-now-except-the-babies-part-i-of-v/
January 4th, 2011 | 4:30 pm
Jeremy, I just reviewed a post of mine from June 2007, commenting on my alma mater (W&M ’75) hosting an exhibit about sex workers, including having them in to speak. I laughed. In the 1970′s we knuckleheads in theater and dance took off our clothes for no reason whatsoever and loved to talk about anything shocking. Especially if sex was involved. 30+ years later it’s a big deal when the sociology department talks about it?
Since the time of Oscar Wilde, at least, roughing up bourgeois taboos has been the beating heart of the arts.
January 4th, 2011 | 5:07 pm
Assistant Village Idiot, I’d go back even further, to William Blake at least.
January 4th, 2011 | 6:51 pm
How about you do it? In particuar, enumerate what you would preserve, and on what grounds — grounds that need to be able to distinguish between what is revised and what is not.
Even the antinominians who would be content with small changes have no reasoning behind it; the appetites they want to satiate merely do not stretch that far.
January 6th, 2011 | 12:18 am
Mary, yours may be a failure to listen and observe to the actual reasoning of those who don’t share your confidence in all the traditional moral norms. If you asking your questions about, for example, conservative attitudes towards gays and lesbians, just listen a bit. You’ll find that people have plenty of moral grounds for objecting. Or, take the progressive criticisms of conservative attitudes towards the death penalty, the prison system, exploitation, torture, industrial meat farming, the environment, etc. I think you’ll find that the moral grounds for objecting are both rich and plentiful.
January 6th, 2011 | 10:00 am
JGY – I will grant than some people have more elevated reasons for such changes. I will insist, however, that there are far more who think they do but are merely rationalising or following fashion. Will you grant that there are some of those?
As an example, note the deterioration in tone between your first and second entries. Testy. Condescending. It immediately arouses suspicions in my mind.
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