The Rise of a Global God-Image? Spiritual internationalists, the international left and the idea of human progress

Abstract

For a period that endured so long it came to seem coextensive with Western modernity, durable barriers stood between those who sought political liberation and those who sought spiritual liberation. We are now emerging from that period. The barriers never operated in the same way or to the same extent in all countries, for much the same reason that ‘secularism’ differed in its effective meaning from country to country. But even in secularism's Anglo-European heartland the division between spirit and politics no longer feels self-evident. This shift cannot help but resonate throughout progressive politics. What we lack are conceptual means for illuminating the shift. The progressive spiritual–political terrain will hardly come into view if it is conceived only in terms of mutual concerns, or shared ethical values, or common campaign work. Pragmatic considerations must be grounded in conceptions of the current world process. Conceptions of the world process must be capable of generating new and fertile responses to many of the deep moral and metaphysical questions which become more insistent in times of rapid—not to say cataclysmic—change. Only in this way can ‘progressive social forces’, whether belonging to the tradition of the left or to spiritual and religious traditions, help to open up the human vista at a time when ‘progress’ is pursued nearly everywhere in its narrowest and most lethal forms. This article takes up these issues, emphasising the need for a reorientation of political thought in the face of a world scene stalked by apocalyptic anxieties. The best child of these anxieties may well be an internationally integrative structure which we can refer to as a ‘progressive global God-image’. Putting forward this idea as an interpretive key both to the possibilities inherent in the progressive spiritual–political encounter and to important aspects of the contemporary planetary situation, the idea is then illustrated by summarising the key claims of a specific group of ‘spiritual internationalists’. In conclusion I suggest that, in so far as the spiritual–political encounter is not joined, contemporary progressives of a spiritual and a traditional leftist kind will continue to represent two forms of ‘unhappy consciousness’. The option that beckons, meanwhile, is for each to discover in the other the resources they need to creatively respond to their own limitations.

Notes

1 T Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans EB Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973, pp 21, 300.

2 W Bello, ‘The decline of American power: implications for the Asia-Pacific’, First EL ‘Ted’ Wheelwright Memorial Lecture, University of Sydney, 1 September 2008. See also Bello, ‘The capitalist conjuncture: over-accumulation, financial crises, and the retreat from globalisation’, Third World Quarterly, 27 (8), 2006, pp 1345–1367.

3 D Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

4 The classic study on this archetype, which restricts itself to the last book of the New Testament and to doomsday cults inspired by that book, however, is EF Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse: A Jungian Study of the Book of Revelation, Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999.

5 F Jameson, The Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p xii.

6 E Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans G Niemeyer, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978.

7 M Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982.

8 From my notes on the Network of Spiritual Progressives Founding Conference, University of California, Berkeley, 23 July 2005.

9 S Clairborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006; C Davis, J Milbak & S Zizek (eds), Theology and the Political: The New Debate, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; R Bhaskar, From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the Actuality of Enlightenment, New Dehli: Sage Publications, 2002; RS Gottlieb, Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change, Cambridge, MA: Westview Perseus Press, 2002; S Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans C Evtukhov, Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; A Kotler (ed), Engaged Buddhist Reader, Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996; H Wells, A Future for Socialism? Political Theology and the ‘Triumph of Capitalism’, Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996; G Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans C Inda and J Eagleson, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988; JH Cone & GS Wiltmore (eds), Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol II 1980–1992, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993; MP Aquino, Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993; and A Shariati, Religion vs Religion, trans L Bakhtiar, Albuquerque, NM: abjac, 1988.

10 For an analysis of a national political scene (the USA) from the perspective of competing images of God, see M Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, San Francisco, CA: Harper SanFrancisco, 2006.

11 Web and library searches show that the concept ‘global God-image’, whether ‘progressive’ or not, does not yet have any currency, at least in English. Only one article was found with the phrase ‘global God image’, and here the phrase, which occurs only once, has instead the merely negative sense of images of God which lack specificity. See P Granqvist, CL Jungdahl & JR Dickie, ‘God is nowhere, God is now here: attachment activation, security of attachment, and God's perceived closeness among 5–7-year-old children from religious and non-religious homes’, Attachment & Human Development, 7 (4), 2005, p 58. The situation with the term ‘spiritual internationalists’ is only marginally better, with only two uses of the term found, and both of these referring to contexts no later than the mid-20th century.

12 CG Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans RFC Hull, London: Routledge & Kegan, 1959; EF Edinger, The New God-Image: a Study of Jung's Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 1996.

13 E Brient, The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Threshold to Modernity, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002; L Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993; A Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986; A Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.

14 DV Porpora, Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p 58.

15 For discussion, see D Martin, Reflections on Sociology and Theology, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; and RA Segal, Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation, Atlanta, GA.: Scholars Press, 1989.

16 R Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

17 P Norris & Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; D Westerlund (ed), Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics, London: Hurst & Company, 1996; and JK Hadden & A Shupe (eds), Prophetic Religion and Politics: Religion and the Political Order, New York: Paragon House, 1986.

18 PL Berger (ed), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Michigan: William B Eerdmans, 1999.

19 Some key integral and associated thinkers of the 20th century are Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), Jean Gebser (1905–73), Frithjof Schuon (1907–98) and Haridas Chaudhuri (1913–75). These journals draw particularly on the thought of contemporaries Ervin Laszlo and Ashok Gangadean, and are influenced by the ideas of Ken Wilber and Don Beck's version of ‘Spiral Dynamics’, a model of psychosocial and moral development primarily directed at corporate executives. See E Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006; AK Gangadean, Between Worlds: The Emergence of Global Reason, New York: Peter Lang, 1998; K Wilber, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997; and DE Beck & C Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

20 R Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

21 L Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1981.

22 See, for example, P Clayton & J Schaal (eds), Practicing Science, Living Faith: Interviews with Twelve Leading Scientists, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

23 World Wisdom Council, ‘The Tokyo Declaration’, Kosmos, V (2), 2006, p 60.

24 M Saionji, ‘Raising our consciousness to create a new civilization’, Kosmos, V (2), 2006, pp 42–43.

25 M Gorbachev, ‘Towards a new civilization’, Kosmos, V (2), 2006, pp 16–18.

26 R Brutoco, ‘The global players: governments, civil society and business’, Kosmos, III (2), 2004, p 10; and N Perlas, ‘Societal revolutions in the 21st century: spirit or empire’, Kosmos, III (2), 2004, pp 38–39.

27 AA Said, ‘Moving towards a transnational consciousness’, Spirituality & Reality, II (1), 2002, pp 6–7.

28 N Roof, ‘Spirituality & reality: thoughts on post 9/11’, Spirituality & Reality, II (1), 2002, pp 12–13.

29 A Gangadean, ‘Awakening global consciousness: why it is vital for cultural sustainability’, Kosmos, III (2), 2004, p 25.

30 G Hayashi, ‘Perspectives from the readers of Kosmos’, Kosmos, V (2), 2006, p 44.

31 C Wigglesworth, ‘Spiritual intelligence: why is it important?’, Kosmos, V (2), 2006, pp 30–31, 44.

32 N Seifer & M Vieweg, ‘Perspectives from the readers of Kosmos’, Kosmos, III (2), 2004, p 44.

33 For critical discussion, see JW Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers–From Plato to the Present, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006.

34 See generally P Clayton & A Peacocke (eds), In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World, Michigan: William. B Eerdmans, 2004.

35 RM Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

36 SM Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung and the Path Towards Wholeness, New York: Paulist Press, 1993; IM Blanco, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic, London: Duckworth, 1975.

37 The Kantian dimension of Jung is pressed home by Edward Edinger in The New God-Image. For a Heideggerian reading, see R Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, London: Routledge, 1991. For an attempt to bring Jung into conversation with Hegel, see Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute.

38 Some contemporary Freudians, following in the tracks of Wilfred Bion, and to a lesser extent of Jacques Lacan, Donald Winnicott and Ignacio Matte-Blanco, are beginning to take another look at the problematic of Ultimate Truth and Absolute Reality. See JS Grotstein, ‘The numinous and immanent nature of the psychoanalytic Subject’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1998, 43, pp 41–68; and M Eigen, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Binghamton, NY: Esf Publishers, 1998.

39 Here I draw on RM Wallace, ‘To the heart of our Western tradition: rediscovering the God of freedom’, unpublished ms. My thanks to Bob Wallace for making this text available to me.

40 C Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans G Schwab, Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1985.