The Quest for God and the Good Life

10. A Redemptive Community

176 10 | A Redemptive Community Cosmopolis Typically, in Insight Lonergan credits progress to human intelligence as driven by the “detached and disinterested desire to know.” Surprisingly, however, he sometimes in this same work credits liberty. Rather than view this as an irreconcilable inconsistency, I would argue that liberty and intelligence are complementary. They work hand in hand. And both are necessary for progress.1 Good ideas can improve the situation, but there must be liberty in the community if the ideas are to be reflected on, communicated, tested , implemented, allowed to change the social situation, and eventually to be reevaluated and corrected by new ideas. None of this movement is possible without both liberty and insight . Lonergan calls this process the “wheel of progress,” and he believes it must be allowed to spin with a great deal of freedom. If it is artificially halted or forced to spin more quickly, it can quickly turn into a “wheel of decline.”2 This is because new ideas cannot be forced and should not be suppressed. They are best allowed to arise unpredictably and under conditions of genuine liberty on personal and local levels. Thus “one might as well declare openly 1. Lonergan, Insight, 1992, 261. This interpretation is supported by Method’s higher synthesis of insight and liberty in the four levels of conscious intentionality or transcendental method: experience , understanding, judgment, and decision. 2. The terms “wheel of progress” and “wheel of decline” are found in Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” in A Third Collection, 105. A Redemptive Community   177 that all new ideas were taboo, as require that they be examined, evaluated, and approved by some hierarchy of officials and bureaucrats .”3 This, of course, is not to say that liberty is license—in other words, that there are no ways of judging and deciding which ideas and courses of action are reasonable and responsible, virtuous or vicious, authentic or inauthentic. As we have seen in the chapters on authenticity and sin, Lonergan believes firmly that freedom must be taken seriously, that there are good and bad decisions , and that some are justly treated as crimes. In the language of politics one might say that Lonergan advocates neither a very conservative approach to new ideas nor a strictly liberal one. He finds good on both sides and thus counsels moderation : There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse halfmeasures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.4 What exactly might such a “not numerous center” look like? What kind of a community would allow the wheel of progress to spin freely and not force it to slow down or to speed up? How would they make prudent, unbiased judgments and decisions about which ideas should be tested and implemented and which should not? How should their authority be exercised? Lonergan calls for a moderate , critical synthesis of the predominant models of unregulated liberalism (“liberal” in the classical sense that favors free-market capitalism) and bureaucratic Marxism,5 but he does not champion any particular type of political or economic organization.6 Rather, he focuses on a redemptive community that would motivate people 3. Insight, 259. 4. Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” in Collection, 266–67. 5. For more on the changing meaning of the term “liberal” see this book’s introduction, note 5, and chap. 5, note 3. 6. Insight, 266. Lonergan did, however, write two books on economics as an exploration into a third way between liberal capitalism and bureaucratic communism: For a New Political Economy, edited by Philip McShane (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), and Macroeconomic Dynamics : An Essay in Circulation Analysis, edited by Patrick H. Byrne and Frederick G. Lawrence (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1999). on a cultural level instead of attempting through economics or politics to impose new social structures. As mentioned in chapter 5’s discussion of sin, Lonergan believes that “the social surd resides least of all in outer...