Ruminations on William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order

Mapping the space

The intersection of politics and religion has been a perennial issue, and despite the pretenses of modernity to have left the difficulties that arise in this context behind, they are still with us. Precisely because the announced victory of reason over old prejudices was far too simplistic by relying itself on a secularized version of the telos of mankind and by its rather questionable treatment of counter evidence, the increasing resistance to the Western modernization project, came as a surprise especially since it occurred frequently after colonial emancipation, which was supposed to have proven the message of secular progress. Of course, for some time the explanation of such discordant data could be dealt with in terms of delays or backsliding, as exemplified in the stage model of growth—identifying the growth of the market and its harnessing for the state building project, for which no viable alternatives existed. As Kant (1991 [1795]) even suggested, the List der Vernunft (cunning of reason) was dragging mankind to its destiny of a cosmopolitan order willingly or unwillingly (pp. 108, 112–114). Such a take on “history” however sits very uneasily with Kant’s own claims that only a free will determining itself can satisfy the criteria of the subject’s moral autonomy. But then again, had even this vision not also been (mis-)used to justify colonialism and imperialism as well as the phantasy of the white man’s burden? Thus, even a preliminary reflection suggests that the narrative of progress has many fault lines. In short, it has become obvious that the problem of social reproduction cannot simply be pressed in the adaptive scheme of repeating the European success or suffer the consequences (Kant, 1991 [1784]: 46).

Instead, the problem of social order required some further reflection on the sources of authority, law, and identity and their role in actual histories, rather than in theories of growth or suspect philosophies of history. Here the discussions of the new discipline of international relations via the British school and the questions of the “civilizational” preconditions for such arrangements, as exemplified by the works of Toynbee (1834–1854), Wight (1977), and Bull (1977) could have started a new “thinking.” Unfortunately, it became later—in a bowdlerized version—Huntington’s (1996) (inevitable?) Clash of Civilizations. Domestically a parallel development centered on the authorizing force of law that in the absence of God or “the people” as an ultimate ground. But since law had become a simply self-referential system for norms, it lacked the aura and persuasive power. This was traditionally supplied by an original grounding in a transcendent order (natural law), or in Gods will, or in the self-determination of a sovereign people, represented by the ahistorical contract in which the volonte generale (Rousseau, 1972 [1762]) provided the legitimacy for rule.

That religion had not simply disappeared, became obvious in the discussions about the limits of law and some questionable conceptual props by Carl Schmitt as well as by and the later discussions in Germany initiated by Böckenförde (1976) (arguing that the liberal state could not secure by law its own normative foundations), or even Habermas’ critique of Luhmann’s attempts to ground authority in functional requirements, implemented by more or less autonomous systems and their codes (Habermas and Luhmann, 1971). Habermas suspected that such self-empowerment of autonomous systems could only result in a technology of social reproduction, not in a legitimate social order.

Significantly also Habermas himself, after a brief attempt of reviving foundationalism in terms of a transcendental pragmatics—in keeping the secular optimism of the Kantian project (and quite at odds with the goals of most American pragmatists he consulted)—got subsequently more interested in examining “life worlds” of actual societies and their traditions, rites, and religions, as he hoped here to discover new ways in which social reproduction could be accomplished in a “post-metaphysical world” (Habermas, 2012: Vol II, sections 2 and 3).

The empirical route of exploring the intersection of religion and politics was taken by those who were interested in the problem of global civil society in which religious organizations figured prominently not only in terms of realizing humanitarian projects but also by promoting an interfaith dialogue that was supposed to probe areas of common or overlapping understandings and its potential for joint action (see Barbato and Kratochwil, 2009; Fox and Sandler, 2004; Hazopoulos and Petito, 2003).

Near at the other end of the analytical spectrum was however—as suggested—a rekindled interest in political theology. It focused on the conceptual link between sacrifice and the sacred and its role in making demands on members of a community—conceived as association of fate, not interest, but not necessarily of a common faith—which has been the subtext of the modern state building process, even if it was often camouflaged as a revolution of universal subjective rights. Here the work of Kahn (2002, 2011) has been seminal to his more recent Political Theology: 4 New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (imitating the subtitle of Schmitt’s (2015 [1922]) and his Theology and Sacred Violence: Torture Terror and Violence (2008). Although both later works are occasioned by the apparent spread of terrorism, reflected in the anxieties of Western public opinion, Kahn’s analysis reaches deeper and elaborates on the original theme of suffering and sacrifice as it emerges from Lincolns Gettysburg address that sanctified the preservation of the “Union” and justified the claim of exceptionalism and of a providential mission. Similarly, Girard’s (1966, 1982) analysis dealing at first only with literary criticism and the problem of self-fashioning of individuals, slowly seeped into the political discourse since especially his later work on violence and evil and certain religious practices such as scapegoating interested social scientist.

Bain’s political theology

This brief overview of the contrast space that maps the field of religion and politics lets us now analyze better Bain’s approach. He is obviously interested in the conceptual rather than phenomenological analysis of the problem, that is, not what religious people do—or claim to do—but how the vocabulary, in which religion and politics interact, lets us understand what is going on. As such the analysis is one (important) step removed from the verbal expression or from subjective beliefs. This is deepening the problem while at the same time restricting it. It is deepening it, as we move from simple utterances to semantic fields, and it is restricting the analysis, because it can no longer claim to provide a general theory or overview of all religions but limits itself ourselves to the semantics of the “book religions,” especially the Judeo-Christian tradition. In this context the controversies between Athens (philosophy) and the Jerusalem (the exegesis of the Old and New Testament through the Christian church(es)), attain their relevance. A personal God as creator must be contrasted with an order of being, in which being, and goodness coincide, and their hierarchy is ordered and conceived as participation in different degrees (the Platonic metechein) in the “good” itself. Equally problematic through was also the difference between a single God and the common Pantheon of gods that lent authority to Rome’s imperial rule. The fault line was provided by the exclusiveness of the monotheistic claim to submission as opposed to plural deities—or even the henotheism of a “one leading God”—which was not unknown in antiquity and other cultures. ¹

At this point Bain introduces—even if only obliquely—a second crucial distinction between a conception of order, in which the parts are fitting like parts in a whole as in the ontological speculation of Plato—and an imposed order. In the case of the Judeo-Christian faith this imposition consisted not only through the ordering of preexisting materials, but in a conception of order in which the things themselves were created by the speech act of the single God as creator and redeemer. The “Let there be . . .” amounted to creation ex nihilo, only to be paralleled by the “thou shall (not). . .” in the practical realm. Such a conception of order requires obedience, not illumination or knowledge. The last distinctions which emerge in this political theology is then the problem of the theodicy—why an omnipotent God allows for evil to exist—and of “grace” (and illumination through God) that “saves” man despite his original sin and why this redemption occurred in historical time and brings historical time to an end. Here a voluntarist notion and of the free will of the subject and its submission to God’s command stand against the natural light that is given to us as part of our nature and which lets us “see” what we must do (as the Pelagians and Gnostics held).

The crucial period in which these conflicting conceptualizations emerged is for Bain the time of the controversy about universals, beginning in the thirteenth century, which served in turn as an attractor to virtually all questions of knowledge and conduct, only to finally end in the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion. It resulted in a new conceptual apparatus concerning the two traditional kingdoms—the worldly things and the spiritual sphere. Of course, there were many loose ends as no agreement existed about the role of miracles as “proof” for the continuous care dispensed by the hidden hand of the creator (the manus gubernatoris), or the need for sacraments, of the role of penance, or of the sovereign’s power who claimed now supreme authority of legislation in analogy to God’s power “to say so”; and finally also the role of justice—derived now from iussum (the command) rather than from a true knowledge of “what is right” (iustum).

One can take issue with Bains interpretation, but there is no doubt that the medieval nominalism controversy is one the true turning points to which also Habermas (2019) pointed in his recent monumental work on the history of philosophy. More interesting is that by calling attention to those conceptual issues Bain is able to show that many of the common understandings about the “old” Middle Ages and Modernity, between the dark ages and the new force of enlightenment, become rather problematic epithets, even if later historiography invoked them habitually. There were indeed many new things that emerged from these medieval debates and during the later transition to humanism.

The latter period is—in my humble view—a bit shortchanged in Bain’s account perhaps with the exception of his extensive and enlightening treatment of Grotius. But one finds no reference at all to the Erasmus/Luther controversy on the free will which would have been germane to his argument. It also would have cast some more light on Bain’s thesis of the modernity of the Middle Ages, a problem he discusses largely through a magisterial exegesis of Hobbes’s work. Controversial as it might seem to the “normal” international relations scholar, it is here that Bain is at his best in showing how the “creation” of political order in analogy to the God as willful creator and as ultimate source of authority, presupposes a theological framework so that the Leviathan—again a biblical monster—can become the mortal God of the state “to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defense.”

There is of course no place here to enter a more extensive discussion save to ask a few “further questions” that are not intended to detract from the merits of Bain’s truly fascinating and illuminating attempt to give the often rather sterile debates in IR a new direction.

Four further questions

The first question has to do with my impression that despite its far-reaching claim for a new thinking in international theory, much of Bain’s argument seems to be directed to realists in assuring them that “theological” concerns should not worry them, as they could easily find their place in that unfamiliar discourse, even if they have let go their security blanket of secularism. After all, the historical narrative that progress was a direct function of the “death of God” might overstate or even misstate the case. But does it establish thereby also that the earlier bold leap of deriving for example, “justice” not from the iustum but from iussum that is, form the command of the sovereign who acts as a stand-in for a personal and “willful God”? Is the space of possibilities of creating order already exhausted by the dichotomy of intrinsic properties of things or by imposition? Is the execution of a plan an imposition? In a way it is, in another way it is not since the analogy to a “command” or even rule breaks down. After all, arrangements need not be buttressed a la Plato by an ontology but could have—pace Aristotle or Hume-conventional character. Here Bull’s reminder that a Hobbesian “imposition” is not all there is, and it shows its bite by pointing to the need every social order has to satisfy the criteria for social co-existence in order to reproduce itself (restrictions on violence, presumption of the binding character of promises, and acknowledgment of titles and their transfer). Somehow hinging everything on impositions—and Hobbes is the of course the authority par excellence for this position—stacks the deck a bit by neglecting these issues so that “realists” can find a new home in a territory where they are usually strangers. Precisely because they have become nowadays “neo-realists” rather than having remained first-image realists as the “original” realist theologians, such as Niebuhr and consorts were—perhaps something was lost even of the original realist message. In any case, the differences between plans, commands, rules, criteria etc. do matter in this context. If my suspicions were right, then I would think that Bain does himself no favor by re-enacting Wendt’s earlier move of dramatically reducing the constructivist agenda by showing that such a truncated research program it should be acceptable even to “scientists” or structural realist like Waltz (Kratochwil, 2000).

This leads me to my second question: Even if we reject the narrative of progress and falsely believe in the Westphalia story and its sub-texts such as the theory of “state-building by war-making” (see McNeill, 1984; Tilly, 1997) as well as the extension of the European system to the “rest of the world”—is the issue of social reproduction really so similar to a creation ex nihilo? Can it be accomplished in the same way a simple speech act does it, which “creates” rather just refers to reality, so that that other dissimilarities can be neglected?

Contrary to most “realists” who make light of language and rather keep to “real” things like “interest” or “power” (especially if it is misconstrued as tangible capabilities), I do believe in the power of the word even if its meaning does not consist in referring to “the world out there.” The bitter truth is, nevertheless, that we are not like God who can bring something into existence by just saying so. Consequently, the range to which the analogy of for example, the juris dictio—that is: the saying what the law is—applies, is rather limited. It is a special case that is illuminating only in highly institutionalized contexts and depends for its effectiveness not simply on meeting the formal criteria, as the discussion in IR on securitization amply demonstrated. Similarly, even if it is true that existential choices do not allow for a universal grounding but might be more akin to “hearing the call”—as Caravaggio ² has captured so well in his painting of the calling of Matthew, or as Kierkegaard encountered when reflecting on Abraham’s choice—can we really think about the problem of social reproduction from such a vantage point? After all, this is why we create institutions and reducing everything again to individual or even existential choices, short-circuits this problem by creating the cult of authenticity—with all its rather disturbing implications, with which we are again confronted today. ³

Third, there is a “further” question concerning the problem of international order and its flip side that of anarchy. It certainly was “shaped by the intellectual harvest” of a specific theological dispute, but perhaps there is still more to the problem of order than that specific dispute. And it is here that the “theology” of creation rather than the nominalist controversy provides some clues. Yes, there is a difference between an order as an arrangement—conceived according to the logic of whole and parts, especially when still buttressed by a hierarchy of being a la Plato—and an order that emerges from a willful act. Here the account of Genesis is instructive. It contrasts the notion of an ordo ordinatus, that is, a perfect order as created by God ex nihilo, with the conception of an ordo ordinans after the Fall. In the first account of Genesis God created the world in 6 days so that he could rest as all what he saw was that it was “good.” In the second account not all that followed was “good.” Not only are the first humans expelled from paradise, but God has now to intervene in history and protect the people who follow him and who eventually make e a Covenant with him. It is the notion of “ordering” as a constant task which becomes crucial as the order is neither “natural” nor can it be taken for granted. For me that is perhaps the most important theologoumenon ⁴ that is hereby conveyed. That “Gods governing hand” the manus gubernatoris, becomes later the “unseen hand” or that a “mechanism” that runs its course after having been wound up like a clock, is then another story and perhaps a numbing simplification. Such constructs hide from us the consequences of the blind trust in laws allegedly ruling the social world as they do in the universe. Analogizing these processes will not lead to an “end” conceived as fulfillment but is likely to end in disaster (as death or entropy is hardly an end, we can have in mind). Or to speak with—and against—the early Waltz: war will happen if nothing is done to prevent it, and by extension: crashes will happen if markets are not maintained, and universal happiness cannot be had by leaving everyone to his own devices, as we are social but also competing beings.

Finally—and as the previous question adumbrates—we, in a globalized world, have now different ordering problems than those which arose out of the clash between Athens and Jerusalem. That these problems cannot be pressed into the framework of secularization has become clear during the last two decades, not only because the rise of fundamentalism, jihadism etc. provides striking counter-evidence, but because secularization is quite different from secularism, propagated in the aftermath of the French Revolutions and the ideology of progress, as Cox (2014 [1965]) pointed out a long time ago. The former means that the separation of God from nature, and the placement of man “above” nature but “below” God opens the space for moral reflection instead of just accepting the ethos into which one is born. But it also provides an opening for politics and its proprium of ordering. Politics thus neither coincides with a particular order claiming universality—as cosmological empires still attempted—but it also cuts against a universalistic ethics that attempts to displace “politics” by postulating for example, that “justice” (Rawls, 1971) as an ideal must overcome the local and contingent solutions typical of “politics.” The alleged reason is that political settlements rely at best on unproblematically accepted or conventional customs and particular historical circumstances. But such an argument is valid only if we presuppose the old ontology of a stable “order of being” in which being and value are permanently fixed and in which the “real” is the permanent, while the contingent is its defective representation of “true being.” But how could we know? Could we not think that the “real” is “only” a historical cut or selection of possibilities, as things could be different depending on the selection? Then no appeal to something permanent standing “behind” instead of being the result of the “cut” can be appealed to. We need not go here into the “ontological” question but even if we think that values and not ontology matters, similar difficulties arise. The assumption that values can be ordered once and for all—even if only weakly such as in Rawl’s “lexical ordering”—remains a heroic assumption which such different philosophers as Aristotle, Vico, Nietzsche, Weber, the American Pragmatists, Wittgenstein and Derrida (to name just a view) debunked (Kratochwil, 2014, 2021).

To that extent the process of secularization—entrusting a task that was taken care of formerly by religious organizations (such as book-keeping of births and death in records of a parish, or the care for the sick to from the hospices of the middle Ages to modern “clinics”) is totally different from secularism that maintains that religious symbols no longer are or even should be used for legitimization purposes of public power since the “place” of religion is exclusively in the private realm as Cox argued. Here of course Hobbes remains a key figure but even he hardly could overcome the contradiction of declaring religion and questions of conscience a private matter, while also pleading for an official “state church” that had to be recognized by all. In practice a variety of arrangement developed to deal with this problem, ranging from the state church model of the Scandinavian countries, to the strict laicite of the French model, to the non-establishment model of the US but with the conception of a “nation under God,” to the German more corporatist model of separation but mutual engagement.

Here Casanovas’ (1994) thesis of the “de-privatization of religion” in the last decades of the twentieth century and Bellah’s (1967), work on civil religion has proved to open up a heuristic counterpoint to the old Westernization/Secularism argument of progress. There is no point here to enter the latter debate (e.g. Norris and Inglehart, 2004) which has perhaps created more heat than illumination but to probe how meaning and justification problems endemic to politics in modernity—when contrasted to the medieval search for redemption as the ultimate goal – has reconfigured the problem of ordering. I am quite consciously using the term ordering rather than “order” for the reasons presented above: ordering means the never-ending task, and it calls attention to the problem that this task is quite different from executing a plan or design, or even moving along in time toward a predestined end of history, which the notion of “order” as a static arrangement or definite plan emphasizes.

In the meantime, we have not only discovered that there is not even in the narrowest sense a “one track” course of (economic) history, as there are even for capitalism many different roads to that end, but that the religion of capitalism, that is, its exclusive concern with value as exchange value—foreshadowed already by Benjamin’s (2018 [1921]) critical essay—has come under scrutiny again. Benjamin’s analysis focused at first glance on the fetish character of products—as pioneered by Marx—but then he leaves orthodox Marxism behind which treats cultural forms as mere reflection of the material base. Instead, by taking a leaf from Simmel’s (1990 [1900]) treatment of money he explores the analogy of religion and capitalism by postulating that capitalism attempts to provide answers to the “same worries, torments, palpitations to which formerly religion attended.” The analogies between religion and capitalism are four: First, capitalism is a cult rather than a revelation, or texts. It is a cult aimed at permanence in which consumption is not allowed to cease (no Sabbath), although, one could add, that occasionally there are “sales,” which are celebrated instead of high-masses or Te Deums. Third, capitalism “lives” from getting indebted (cult of credit). But different from the original personal relationship between owner and debtor the commercialization of debt allows now for depersonalization of the original donor and debtor relationship, and there is no atonement for having failed, no grace and no penance, only gain or loss and the “discounted” final apocalyptic crash ending the entire system.

Different however from most “efficient market economists”, economists’ money did not for Benjamin provide a final answer to issues of meaning; instead, he saw the tendency of this cult to derail into a permanent show, which captures an alienated society and provides “amusement” as a palliative for the unease and hangovers that follow from the realization that everything is for sale. True, money shows how things can become “equal” by measuring them in terms of one standard but that it is precisely this equality comes with Gleichgueltigkeit as its load star—with its double entendre of “having equal value” and of indicating indifference. Because being “all the same to me” means in effect that it is irrelevant and thus does not provide for orientation which things we should do and pay attention to. I think this “transcendence” centers on the distinction of significance and meaning—a significance is, so to speak, internal to systems thinking or even to mathematics where values can be ascribed to certain threshold numbers. But meaning concerns judgments about what problems and which modes of thinking about them deserve our attention.

In the following I want to elaborate on this point by focusing on three issue: the classifications of goods, different notions of happiness that inform our life-projects, and departing from those two considerations, an admittedly sketchy “phenomenological” reflection on the role of media in communicating these implications and shaping our practical choices.

If we look at the issue of goods, religion in one way seems to offer the exact opposite of goods which have lost their aura of a bonum and have become a “product” for the market. Here economic analysis—of course called into question by Marx’s analysis of fetishistic character of commodities—sees most goods as private, destined for use in daily life and usually provided by an exchange (later mediated by money). But in the case of religious goods, their supply is not limited (scarcity) and neither is their distribution and production characterized by competition. Salvation is potentially available to for everybody—although if you are an adherent of predestination, it cannot be fathomed, and only success might serve as a proxy, as Weber tried to show in his Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. But this fundamental distinction opens up the space for exploring how the nature of goods, and the satisfaction they promise are linked to conceptions of “happiness” that provides since Aristotle’s time the horizon of the “practical world” and for the “ways of life” by which individual and social identities are formed.

Let us begin again with the classical market and the goods which are produced and offered by it. Of course, even narrow economic analysis must admit to the existence different types of goods, but it does so by taking the prototype of “the market” as an explanans even though it stays in the background. Take for example “public goods”—which are introduced with a nod to the state—as they exist since they cannot be provided by the market—although we all might want them—because of market failure. Then there are goods, which are “public” to a specific group, but subject to exclusion in their enjoyment (club goods). But then there are also “trademarks” or licenses (such as the permission of engaging in a “profession”) (Abbott, 1988; Kratochwil, 2017) that raise different issues of regulation and know-how and address the issue of “quality” which is not reflected in the price. Here the question of meaning re-enters since money is no longer is the only signal for orientation, even if some economists still deify “the market” (in the singular, like God!) (Cox, 2019).

Meaning enters, I think at two points: first at the point, when I have to decide what to do that is, how one is to use one’s time, and pay attention to which problems—which quickly takes us to other orientations than price, as time comes into focus – and second, at the point of using the “hidden” codes (such as accents), habits and display in order to emphasize differentiations, that are important for orientation. Here Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979]) work on “tastes” becomes important and opens the wider field of symbolic capital and its use. Importantly, these two questions are connected via the issues of “identity” of the actor although, the latter (symbolic capital) soon took off and became mainly a matter for economic research on media, such as determining the for example, value of a firm in which the usual natural assets, the tangible assets, such as buildings, machinery etc. increasingly lose their role as indicators of value, while names, patents, and the attention their image can increase their standing (of which both the discussion about “apple’s” market value and the about the (inflated) valuation of the “Trump” corporate holdings show).

But let us return to the problem of identity. If one acts and lives in a status society what one has to do is more or less prescribed: one has to represent the status to which one belongs, and perhaps honor the Sunday to show respect to God. If one works, then one works only for gaining “time out” (otium) for reflection and enjoyment. To that extent, someone who is busy being occupied, be it as a laborer—or even as a “noble”—who might be busy to display because s/he privileged of being able to contract out “work”—one has no major problems with the meaning of one’s existence. But things are different when the status differentiation is under attack. Then problems of work and its meaning arise: the secularized Calvinist must become a workaholic ⁵ in order to find meaning and the insecure status person becomes the caricature of a Don Quixote who displays the all the acts of representing knighthood, even if they are meanwhile misplaced and appear only comical to the onlookers. But as Don Quixote contends “Yo so, quien soy” (I know who I am), attempting to turn the table. Of course, such problems become even more difficult to manage when orientations and criteria for choosing among different life projects come under pressure.

Nietzsche once put this problem in terms of the death of God and of the last man who lives an inauthentic life hedged in by conventions which, however, have lost their meaning and which make life a humdrum affair of conformity. Significantly he mentions in this context the shallowness of this type of happiness based on the “rational” satisfaction of the presumed needs which is repeated in the stanza of “we have invented happiness” that goes through the whole Vorrede (Introduction) of his Zarathustra:

Look, I’ll show you the last man. . .

We have invented happiness – says the last man and squints

One is neither rich nor poor. Both of which are too onerous. Who wants to rule? Who wants to obey? Both are too difficult. . .

No shepherd but one flock. Everybody wants the same. Everybody is equal: one who feels differently voluntarily commits himself to the insane asylum. . ..

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one for the night, but esteems health. ⁶

Based on this criticism, different notions of happiness leading to different forms of self-fashioning become visible, which I want to examine more closely.

There is the Aristotelian idea of the individual living a life of eudaimonia (of having good “spirits” = “demons,” whiskey was not yet invented!) who receives gratification from different sources and parts of life: family, community, wealth, health etc., all that make you happy without establishing a metric for it, or postulating a final goal which is subject to calculation, instead of just providing an horizon in which these different spheres can be placed.

The Stoic notion of the aphtonos (someone who is envy-free) is quite different again: someone is happy because s/he does not need all the things. S/he is satisfied based on self-restraint and does not envy anybody.

The Jewish notion of happiness is connected to the fulfillment of God’s law, whereby the two tables listing the first three commandments on the first table and the more particular duties on the second regulating social interaction (the fourth about the honoring of parents is building a bridge of the first to the second tablet.)

The Christian notion of beatitude is again different. It sees happiness in the redemption in an afterlife and even the Pauline notion of caritas is not a love of the actual other—mirroring oneself in them—but entails the notion of helping others to save their souls and reach their destiny.

Again, a different life project is embedded in the “pursuit of happiness” which is in Jefferson originally rendered as “property”—and it meant “land” in particular, as landed property grounds you and ties you to a place, instead of following “foot-lose” monetary pursuits. After all, money does not care to whom it belongs.

Nevertheless, this latter notion was already foreshadowed in Hobbes, as his pursuit was conceptualized as the never ending search for satisfaction of desires; in classical liberalism it then becomes the “greatest pleasure” overall,—and when the difficulty of the interpersonal comparison of utility is reflected—it morphs into the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” or, even more particularly, it provides the justification for moving to the Pareto frontier. Such a move makes at least one better off and no one worse off and since we discount the future and are not envious—as those profiting do not take it from those whose reward remains the same—we need not think about the problem that over time the increases for those profiting will create greater and greater inequality.

Rousseau’s conception of the authentic individual whose nature is not fixed once and for all, but which is historically formed, provides perhaps the most scathing criticism of this “rationalist” model of man. But contrary to common beliefs, Rousseau never advocated a return to the “simple life” of a past—already en vogue among the court and the emerging bourgeois society—leading to the kitsch of living like shepherds in an arcadian environment. Between the First and the Second Discourse ⁷ Rousseau realizes that because we constantly compare ourselves to others, “property” inevitably leads to a skewing of human interests where more is always better than less—if goods and not bads are at issue—and that this leads paradoxically to the denaturation of man and his desires. There might be a famine or plague in a primitive society, there is usually no “poverty” (except in cases of natural disasters), as things are shared and surpluses are usually re-distributed at “feasts.” Paradoxically poverty is now the root of private property since desires expand and no natural limit exist for desires as they are products of urges that have been transformed by imagination. This is what Girard has called later the imitative desire ⁸ which is the tap root of conflict. Interestingly, the last two commandments of the Decalogue speak to the same problem. On the surface they seem only to particularize the preceding general categorical prohibitions of adultery, murder, theft, lying (bearing false witness). But at another level they are now related explicitly to coveting and not only to a “bad” deed done, but to imagination. For Rousseau it became clear that only a radical transformation of individuals making them into moral beings through education (Emile) and the miraculous alienation totale in the Social Contract, can make them “free,” since a return to a primordial paradise is impossible. To that extent this is a secularization but not a secularism project—if we avail ourselves again of Cox’s distinction noted above.

But as Rousseau already hints at, the ordering problem becomes then rather difficult because the problem is no longer a simple fit between “man’s” actual nature and the institutional order; rather the issue is now of how ordering and the media through which it occurs interact while no view from “nowhere” (outside this social world) is available. In addition, ordering—as we have seen-is not a simple cognitive problem either, as emotions powerfully shape what we want to know and how we assess what needs to be done.

When we apply this analysis to the issue of how religion can tend to the interests and wishes of a mostly narcoticized public, we see the difficulties “in living colors” ⁹ : for a public, which is accustomed to be entertained rather than being challenged, religion’s demands for a responsible conduct has few selling points. As consumers we want to be reassured rather than called to responsibility. Consequently, we prefer some “feel good” therapy that promises to optimize our “inner-self” rather than a working through of our problems; so even psycho-analysis is out, and—an endless slew of different “coaching” sessions is “in.” We prefer a religion without God, but one which has at least angels whose business is to take care of us ¹⁰ ; we opt for rites in which we can become “one” with others in some unfathomable ways, so that even the command of honoring the Sabbath is better understood as a call for a full day of entertainment—either in front of the television, or even better, at a place where we can have a big show, such as an arena or convention center. Then soon the agenda of religion and the goods it offers becomes customer-friendly: it offers a mix of song and dance, of streaming lights and the dramatic stories of “real people,” who as former sinners have converted, which puts us in the audience nearly in the place of God to whom formerly the confessions were made. In this way the prophecy of Andy Warhol that everybody can now be famous for a few minutes has come true as our faces are beamed nation-wide—or perhaps even around the world—into the pop-corn cluttered dens and sitting rooms. And at these moments of Durkheimian effervescence, we can finally let ourselves fall into the ocean of feelings. After all, in this in this perfectly orchestrated form of “service” (nice change in meaning!) Not even our children can pester as is often the case in real life—since they are also separately entertained with Disneyfied versions of the “stories” in the Bible, provided in living colors (allegedly “reinforcing” the message), or are even supplied with digitalized computer games.

But somehow, we might have an inkling that this is not exactly what the original message of the “jealous God” (Exodus 20, 4) meant. But whatever we think of it, we soon realize that even God, the father has now been transformed with the help of the media into a McLuhanesque new and improved version of Santa Claus. . . about time, one could think . . . since his son made the charts already decades ago (Jesus Christ Superstar!) Postman (2006 [1985]) had already analyzed these phenomena in the 80s and we can see how and why this trend has “progressed” further through digitalization. Now we can even immerse ourselves in virtual realities—nobody needs to be present, when we gun down monsters or terrorists, perform in front of thousands and thousands of invisibles, or inform cheering crowds of “thumb uppers” of our plans.

Although we always had been able to read fiction and let our phantasy roam, but now we are captured in a way that differs significantly from just reading a text, in the ancient “Gutenberg age” of communication. Then we could still pause and reflect about what we read instead of being guided through a virtual world which envelops us if we wear blinders—and as long as they function, so that we do not hit a table or a beam in the analogue world.

But, if being startled by all this is not enough, the market of sense-making also offers a more dystopic way of responding to the loss of orientation. Instead of the announced Uebermensch, who somehow got on the wrong bus and has not arrived, the last men of Nietzsche who feel now totally lost, can only squint their eyes as they meet the sales managers of the apocalypse: no plan B, millions dying, and species extinction in the offing. Doom sells now nearly as well as sex, since eros and thanathos (death) have finally developed a new winning business model, ready to service our fears, which all converge in a generalized and undifferentiated Angst.

Of course, we always had “problems” and feared losses, which made us cautious or perhaps even resentful. But now panic, allied with fury (greetings to Greta!)—reign supreme; both emotions are powerfully enhanced by the echo chambers of the media, as we are unable to deal with a predicament that we cannot grasp. Since these “mimetic” emotions feed on themselves but are thereby unable to address concrete problems—not even to speak of being able to solve them—we quickly look for scapegoats, identifying those who brought us to here; and we look for redeemers—no further questions asked—who will (?) get us out of here. Scientists are then a good bet for using their symbolic capital and offer themselves as redeemers—never mind the part they have played in getting us where we are now! The only question though for us is then how serious or sincere we are in displaying our commitments and good intentions, that is, showing that we are on the right side, as this is the only thin straw, we can identify for gaining a general absolution. The old Kantian questions, of “what can we know,” and “what shall we do” recede into the background as even the question of “what can we hope” has been overwhelmed by: “what must we dread?”—with which Hobbes once ushered in modernity and whom Bain has helped us to understand better.