Preface

We are conspirators by nature. How did the negative connotations of that word almost entirely crowd out the equally possible sense of collaboration in pursuit of the good? The Oxford English Dictionary offers a citation for the positive meaning of the word from Thomas Starkey in 1538: "The civil life is a political order of men conspiring together in virtue and honesty" (in a modernized spelling). The etymological sense of conspiracy, "to breathe together," reminds me of a passage from John's gospel depicting the appearance of the resurrected Christ among the disciples: "And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'" (John 20:22, RSV). To speak of ourselves as conspirators is to be mindful of our communitarian nature and to be open to the breath of the Holy Spirit that is offered to all.

It is illuminating to be mindful that we conspire together for good and for evil. The sociological concept of institutional racism, for example, captures the phenomenon of cooperation in evil, and such cooperation is far more powerful, dangerous, and damaging than individual instances of bigotry alone. In Catholic social thought, the concept of "structures of sin" brings out the damaging consequences of cooperation in sin, while asserting that sin is rooted in individuals. John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis points to the powerful effects of institutionalized sin: "The sum total of the negative factors working against a true awareness of the universal common good, and the need to further it, gives the impression of creating, in persons and institutions, an obstacle which is difficult to overcome. If the present situation can be attributed to difficulties of various kinds, it is not out of place to speak of 'structures of sin'" (36). This concept also plays a part in John Paul II's account of the challenges and opportunities posed by economical globalization in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus.

Machiavelli offers a seemingly benign view of such structures when he repudiates the ancient concept of the common good as unsuitable to the exigencies of life as we know it. He proposes instead, as in his play Mandragola, an image of human society as consisting of the carefully intertwined pursuit of individual desires and interests in which the so-called common good is nothing other than a pattern of complementary sins in which a kind of stability is achieved because interests are cleverly arranged so that each person is appropriately gratified. Mandragola offers an extreme example of such self-interest—an arrangement is established by a kind of organizational mastermind such that an older husband is likely to gain a son and heir, a younger man will gain a lover, and the priest will gain cash donations, while a previously virtuous wife is shown to be enlightened to the new order of mutually intertwined self-interests. Each sinful desire is rendered more likely to come to its (rotten) fruition because it serves the sins of others as well. The arrangement of mutual interests in Mandragola is particularly harsh—we can wonder whether the virtuous wife has in fact been corrupted by the sins of her husband, priest, and mother rather than enlightened to the new order—and not all such arrangements are as harsh as this example, but whenever the central story of human cooperation focuses upon the gratification of self-interest, surely we are in danger of losing sight of any higher good in the light of which we can come together.

But we do not go wrong if we recapture the positive sense of the word and speak of worship as a conspiracy of praise in which each breath expressed in hymns joins all others and in which musical harmony is an image and experience of the conspiracy of good. Such structures of good are cooperative efforts perhaps even in a fuller sense than any structure of sin. We find a remarkable and bold attempt to think in such terms on the largest possible scale in On the Moral Nature of the Universe by Nancey Murphy and George F. R. Ellis...