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This Speakout has not been edited

By Wendell G. Bradley, Windsor

Because the dominant political paradigm, liberalism, is premised on power-centered concepts, it is becoming increasingly out of touch. We need a more adaptive, satisfying and unifying political underpinning.

Consider the idea that humans have a unique spiritual morality. It can be thought of as a conscience-like gift whose social impulses arise spontaneously and creatively to give us an inner sense of appropriateness as a complement to our rationality.

Embodied morality is spiritual because its impulses issue spontaneously and creatively; it is moral, because its prompts come with an inner sense of appropriateness. Our spiritual morality first calls us to social responsibility during the mother-child attachment process. Its social influences within larger groupings may be either cultivated or repressed.

Because our spiritual morality guides without conscious reflection, it precedes reason’s ethics (does not specify any rules of conduct). This makes our spiritual morality entirely distinct from rationality’s ethics.

Our spiritual morality is wagered as a gift of animal inheritance that prompts social outreach, engenders attachments, cherishes freedom, presumes social responsibility and brings quality to interactions. Upon cultivation, our gift of spiritual morality manifestly underlies our social disposition, love of freedom, notion of fairness, and sense of fulfillment. These qualities make relational self’s creative, social imagination understandable as the starting point of society, thereby providing the basis for an entirely new social perspective.

Is such a belief system true to human nature? Is it socially realistic? Since the linguistic turn of philosophy, there are no truths and no pre-existing reality to uncover. All attempts to know are through language, which only relates things to each other-provides no fixed reference. This makes knowledge of absolute truth and reality an impossibility. As a result, postmoderns proceed not by supposed facts, rather via relational interpretations (modelings).

Keep in mind, science reductively models within ‘experienced’ causal chains. In the social sciences, these causal connections are so complex that researchers have generally been able to find, in some description, what they are looking for. This is why no consensus is likely to soon materialize that will ‘scientifically’ confirm or deny evolutionary explanations of morality. The issue for postmodern pragmatists is whether it is more productive to proceed via a nondeterminative, individual ‘gift of morality’ functioning in a mutually reinforcing relationship with social nurturing, than the currently dominant model that posits a selfish/aggressive human nature. Because of such considerations, postmodern pragmatists understand ‘truth’ as ‘what works’ by way of belief and concentrate on the practicality of relationally constructed belief systems.

Consider how Western thinking has been based on a succession of logocentrisms-presumed higher realities whose implications are eternal and pure. Examples are: Plato’s ideal forms, Judeo-Christianity’s omnipotent God, and Nature’s disclosures.

Postmodern thinkers now understand that all such centering truths are manmade. Any ‘objectivity’ we gain derives from agreement on our interpretations. Such agreement comes from a language-based, collaborative weaving of interrelationships, not from an uncovering of pre-existing natures. The more consensus, the less ‘subjectivity’, and the greater ‘fact’. As circumstances change, socially correct and eternal (logocentric) politics fail.

Modernist liberalism claims that human nature is essentially so selfish/aggressive it necessitates a higher or central ordering. An essentialist human nature, however, proves too exclusive, ethnocentric, and fixed to be adaptive. Such a ‘human nature’, for example, cannot acknowledge that we sense infringements of our personal integrity as unjust or find cooperative alternatives to selfishness relatively pleasurable (a recent neurological confirmation).

Liberalism’s universaling politics is derived from univocal reason. This makes it too estranged from our spiritual/moral endowment to lastingly satisfy. It is especially deficient in imagination, social inspiration, and adaptive ethical guidance.

Politically, reason has never spoken with a single voice.

Liberalism’s ‘universal’ reason is an exclusive rationality that can lead almost anywhere. It has, for example, accommodated various logics of domination such as patriarchy. Its reason has also pitted self against society and made autonomy possible only privately/reactively.

While today’s power-politics and positive religions cling to a right-knowing ethics that entirely discounts our vital spiritual morality, relationalists understand that social groups inform their deepest purposes via spiritually moral incorporations.

They only later rationalize them.

Contrast, for example, liberalism’s justice paradigm with the relational perspective of justness. Justness is a spiritually moral perception, while justice interprets some ethically given appropriateness. Accordingly, justice depends on legal sanction from some central political power. Its administrations are carried out according to the in-power’s prevailing rationality. Justness, on the other hand, is actualized by upholding the integrity of our spiritual morality, previous to and during all social structurings. It understands spiritual morality’s creative inspiration and quality-seeking impetus as, ultimately, our only guide for social structurings.

The socially respected spiritually moral inputs that underpin a justness-oriented society allow development of a relational, as opposed to a selfish/reactive autonomy. From a relational perspective, today’s legalisms, such as ‘appropriate person’ designations or the selective grant-backs known as ‘rights’, appear either infringing or inadequate. The advantage of a socially sacrosanct spiritual morality is: it results at once in the deep freedom rights hint at, but can never accomplish because of their partial forms.

It is, after all, our hope for unencumbered spiritually moral exercise that is behind all popular freedom and justness movements. People are simply more concerned with their spiritual moral integrity and relational autonomy than their administered counterparts of justice and liberty.

Put succinctly, postmodern relationalism understands that we must chance our gift of spiritual morality, uncertainty and all. There is hope. An inviolable spiritual morality, structurally modeled in authentically communal practice, promises to substantively improve today’s human condition.

READER COMMENTS

Try plain English. What a waste of paper.

Rubish.

Mr. Bradley---if your intent was to enlighten the masses, then your delivery mode has thwarted you. Any writer knows that to reach the most minds, the words used are to be understandable at a level where the majority are able to digest, understand and integrate the concepts, thereby increasing the chance of applying both "head" and "heart" reactions to make a choice whether to embrace or reject the idea at hand. Okay, that last sentence was pretty wordy, but I'll bet most people understood it....

Maybe this Speakout should have been edited.

Huh? I consider myself a liberal - but I know I'm far to stupid to understand whatever was said here. I'm sure there are other folks out there who are up on "postmodern relationalism" - but I'm not one of them. Are you planning on doing the "Classics Illustrated" version of this for those of us who actually left school after we were done with college?

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