Intersubjective Cohesion: A Way to a Truer Orthodoxy
The need for orthodoxy declines as the power of "ortho antilipsi" arises.
I’m reading Deep Church Rising: Recovering the Roots of Christian Orthodoxy, by Andrew Walker, who was a professor at King’s College of London before he passed last year. Walker suggests that the Church can become a more vital force in the world again by embracing its traditions.
The handful of people who read this post will be all over the map in their ideas about spirituality, organized religion, and the capital “c” Church, and it’s tricky to try to establish a common context, but to try to do so quickly, I think you could say:
Jesus was a significant figure with a vision for individual transformation, interpersonal transformation, and systemic transformation.
Some people believe Jesus embodied a profound merger of the consciousness of a human being and the consciousness of God. For Christians especially, that means that Jesus presents a singular vision for getting humanity connected with a “triune” God.
The Church is an effort to build out Jesus’ vision of individual, interpersonal, and systemic transformation on Earth.
And then, to crudely lay out Walker’s point, you could say:
Over time, the effort of the Church has significantly fragmented through three major schisms:
the separation of the Catholic (Western) Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church;
the Reformation, which separated the Catholics from the Protestants;
a modern “schism” whereby a wide range of folks, including clergy, now see themselves as members of the Church without really ascribing to all of its central tenets and purposes.
As a result of those schisms, there is now a veritable multiverse of Christianities, which have limited effectiveness in actually realizing this vision (i.e., in Gospel terms, bringing the “Kingdom” to Earth).
The solution, Walker says, is “deep church,” which is to return to and re-embrace the long tradition of the Church. Not for the sake of taking up empty, perfunctory rituals, but for the sake of reconnecting with the fulness of this long, profound effort to organize around a profound life and teaching.
Of course, many people react to the idea of church, and especially the idea of orthodoxy, the way a cat reacts to being given a pill. In my experience, people outside the Church often associate the Church with stern systems of coercion and control. And that’s not unreasonable. Orthodoxy can be silly at best, and at worst it can be domineering and cult-like.
But I’m actually with Walker through a lot of his argument, at least to an extent. Not everybody has to believe in Jesus. But coherence is valuable. You don’t have to look too far in any direction in the world today to see what too much fragmentation and confusion does. Fragmentation, friction, debate can be fruitful, but not absolutely. The more of it you have and the longer it lasts, the more destructive it becomes.
You can fairly criticize the Church in any number of ways, but as the world reels in a cascade of existential crises, and you watch people try to organize into new movements in response, it’s worth noticing that the Church constitutes a genuine effort to solve pretty much all of them — and not entirely without success. Just as one example, Walker points out that in order for capitalism to break into the world it had first to dismantle an essentially Christian resistance to greed in Europe — and that this only became possible in the wake of the Church’s second schism. It could be argued that capitalism has its role in modern life, but I don’t know that it could be argued but that metastatic capitalism currently ravages the world — and so it’s definitely worth noticing that, for a time anyhow, the Church constituted a firewall against it.
This is only one example of many. It’s popular to criticize the Church, and it’s not popular to praise it. And part of the reason it’s not popular to praise the Church is because people simply do not notice the good that it has done over time, including structural weight-bearing good to the social fabric as a whole — which is now deteriorating in ways that bother lots of people — who do not make a connection to the waning influence of things like the Church.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that much of the criticism of the Church — I mean the criticisms of the Church generally, in its mission and the implementation of the mission — is criticism leveled at a huge organization that is very visibly handling one of the basic problems of any organization or community has as it’s trying to be useful in the world. Any religious group, any personal growth organization, any nonprofit, any company, any relationship, any family, any community, any culture, any society is going to run into a basic problem:
Coherence is valuable, and it requires effort.
Also, norms can be rigid, foolish, and/or abusive.
Particular attention needs to be given to best practice. And it seems to me that best practice is something that could be called intersubjective cohesion: a search for harmony that is thoroughly based in the idea that no one has, nor can have, a monopoly on the truth.
I’ve mentioned this idea to a few people and they have said, “Doesn’t ‘intersubjective’ cohesion’ just mean reason? Isn’t that what we’ve always been doing?” It’s sort of what people do. But it seems to me that where the process tends to break down is when people are not skilled at the intersubjective part, which requires development in four domains:
A personal level, involving self-knowledge, self-control, self-aware action,, and other personal skills, such as just general critical thinking.
An interpersonal level, whereby we can take charitable interest in one another, where we can tune into other people’s experience and let that awareness interact with our awareness of own experience. It involves awareness of connection and boundaries. Etc.
A systemic level, whereby we understand the design of systems around us and the positive and negative effects those designs have.
A cosmic level, were we connect with a higher intelligent mystery through contemplative, essentially mystic processes.
To me, all four of these domains are actually non-negotiable. Through development of these domains, intersubjectivity is possible. Without development in any one of them, it isn’t.
Intersubjectivity and cohesion, then, are like two attractors that pull a reality into being:
When common life is skillfully intersubjective, particular people or points of view do not dominate, frictionally, begging some amount of revolution or schism, but instead, an evolving, emergent sense of truth appears and gains in resolution.
When cohesion is a continual goal, upheld by everyone, a group retains its direction. Because life’s imperatives may be rascally hard to articulate when you get down to it, but it’s clear that some exist. The journey leads somewhere.
Intersubjectivity that develops in the four aforementioned levels doesn’t have to be a mushy average of half-informed responses. But if you want your view to be heard, it’s good to be accountable for your development at all four levels. How well do you know yourself? What is your personal skill set? How well do you tune into others? How well do you understand the world’s systems? How hard are you trying to connect with, and be shaped by, the cosmic?
It seems to me that when people are really rigorously pursuing development in all of these domains, they are going to tend to converge.
And that when people converge, but without full development in all of these domains, they’re usually in a bubble.
And that when people clash, it’s often because one or more parties in the conflict have not owned their work in one or more of these domains.
I can’t stress enough how important attentive practice in all of these domains appears to be. We live nominally in a post-Enlightenment era significantly haunted by an underlying assumption that the achievements and freedoms of the Enlightenment have been won once and for all, and therefore that little effort needs to be exerted to maintain them. Meanwhile, the architecture of Enlightenment thinking has deteriorated, visibly. Where I go, at least, there are many, many people who consider themselves reasonable enough to participate in conversations on this basis of those batlles won once and for all, who are in fact not nearly as reasonable as they seem to themselves to be. Attention to all four levels: personal, interpersonal, systemic, cosmic, can help reveal important prerequisite work that needs to be done.
As people develop in these four domains, and then pursue cohesion, the idea of orthodoxy, “right belief,” disappears. It’s replaced by something I think you could call ortho antilipsi, or “right perception.”
A basic question emerges: “What’s real?” People can begin to come together around that.
As I’ve been reading Deep Church Rising, I’ve also been reading a range of early Christian writings: The Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas, the letters of St. Irenaeus, Augustine’s Confessions, a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. I am struck by the fact that Jesus’ life was profound and mysterious. The Christian message is profound and mysterious. The work of putting the message into practice in complex. And the Church is indeed deep. It’s vast in space and time; it’s rich and multilayered — and it’s worth attention.
The question immediately asserts itself: “What’s real?” And the need for any collective answer to be achieved through an intersubjective process seems to me to be perfectly obvious.
At a basic level, is shalom real? Is it really true that there is a harmony of creation what all beings approach throughout time, through inner and outer alignment? If it’s real, what is it? The intersubjective process helps us to arrive at ideas that persist in time, they lead us into the clearing.
I’m not coming up with a clever punchline here. So to end, I’d just say that I think this is one of the most important ideas.
. . . Except, also, to say this: The creation of intersubjective cohesion generally requires some kind of gathering, and the gathering requires a steward. Or, in relationships that don’t require a steward there is, usually, the stronger and the less strong, though these roles may change over time.
It may not be true for all times and places, but in our time and place, great care must be taken to limit the power of the steward or the stronger. This is because, in our time and place, the steward or the stronger is almost certain to abuse power and to usurp the collective trust of the group to serve his or her own needs to greater degree than it serves the needs of others.
I imagine it’s possible for groups to become savvy enough, both interpersonally and intrapersonally, so that this dynamic isn’t a problem. But in my experience that kind of wisdom is rare, and the abuses of leaders are so frequent as to be nearly ubiquitous. It constricts true clarity, and it’s a real problem.
It’s good to do something to keep it in check.