A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Five. The Lack of Civil Society

125 Five The Lack of Civil Society Much like today, the emergence of the idea of civil society in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the result of a crisis in social order and a breakdown of existing paradigms of the idea of order. —Adam B. Seligman Civil society has become an urgent topic, unfortunately. We do not usually notice things until they are broken, and the increasing attention of public leaders and scholars1 is a sign that ours is in trouble. Everyone seems to agree that a strong civil society is essential for healthy democracy , which would be unremarkable except (as we shall see) there is no agreement on what civil society actually is. The unsurprising consequence is that there is also little agreement about what must be done to reinvigorate it. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a new perspective on the origins and function of civil society, an approach that so far as I know has been overlooked in contemporary discussions. The modern development of civil society has been understood as a reaction to the rise of European nation-states in the seventeenth century, initially around absolute monarchs who weakened diffuse feudal centers of authority by consolidating power into their own hands: 126 A Buddhist History of the West . . . [T]he transformation and subdivision of the idea of societas civilis was stimulated primarily by a specifically political development : the fear of state despotism and the hope (spawned by the defeat of the British in the American colonies, as well as by the earliest events of the French Revolution) of escaping its clutches. (Keane 1989, 65) Civil society thus tends to be understood as another result of the secularization that began in the sixteenth century and culminated in the revolutions of the eighteenth century, by enthroning our cherished beliefs in the rights of man [sic] and the integrity of individuals. The previous chapter has questioned this supposed secularization by arguing that the rapid development of nation-states and corporate capitalism may also be understood in more religious terms, as a change of direction that did not so much supplant our spiritual concerns as pursue them in a this-worldly fashion. The Protestant Reformation did not just elevate God and free this world for more material pursuits: the decline of a Catholic church and its ecclesiastical paraphernalia (monasteries, sacraments, pilgrimages, etc.) meant that the duality in daily life between sacred and secular spheres was eliminated (or much reduced) without that resolving our lack. The diminution of church authority meant that new ways had to be found to address lack. The spiritual concern and energy that had previously been devoted to supporting an ecclesiastical sphere found a new direction in the heightened individual responsibility of each person for his or her own spiritual life and destiny.This change also involved increased concern for the worldly conditions that affected such development, for others as well as oneself. One could no longer simply depend upon the established Church to take care of one’s lack, especially when the true church was such a hotly contested issue. Chapter Four looks at how this development contributed to the reorganization of political and economic institutions, which eventually took on a life of their own and now subordinate us to their own developmental imperatives. This chapter begins by looking at some countermovements that sought to reform society in a more ostensibly religious direction, so that it would better conform with God’s spiritual plan. This movement eventually led, in particular, to the revolution in mid-seventeenth-century England that culminated in the execution of Charles I of England and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s religiously based Commonwealth (1649–1660).That social ferment was as The Lack of Civil Society 127 much religious as political, since it would be anachronistic to distinguish between them.2 Such a radical political transformation became possible only because it was widely understood in millennial terms, as fulfilling Biblical prophecy about the return of Christ and the events necessary to help establish His kingdom on earth. Such a religiopolitical revolution does not fit into the usual “secularizing ” understanding of Western historical evolution, so its importance tends to be neglected in favor of the French Revolution, whose leaders exalted Reason—even to the point of deifying it! But the legacy of English millennial expectations, and the ways those hopes transformed when they were frustrated by the failure...