In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

405 The Unity of Sacrifice 9 There’s more to you than mere money-lust, Duddy, but I’m afraid for you. You’re two people, that’s why. The scheming little bastard I saw so easily and the fine, intelligent boy underneath that your grandfather, bless him, saw. But you’re coming of age soon and you’ll have to choose. A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.1 Taken from Mordecai Richler’s successful novel, the quote above marks a snippet of conversation between the dying uncle and his grasping and conflicted nephew. Perhaps Uncle Benjy’s claim about “men” is true as a hope, or at least an ideal. But if “boys will be boys, men are better at it”; and the latter saying, well embedded in popular wisdom, merely exposes the deep ambiguity at the heart Richler’s novel. There will be murder, unless and until something takes its place. Is this true of the Church as well? Solidarity and Consensus Are They the Same? The experienced moral limitations of the political processes we have been surveying—the spur to protest, which drove so much tumultuous struggle in the nineteenth century—disclosed a very real need. That need, continuous 1 Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959; repr., Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1964), 270. The citation is from Duddy’s dying uncle, Benjy, in a letter the latter has left his nephew. 406 A Brutal UNity over so much time, was for some kind of valuing foundation for human social life that could go beyond a faith in putatively abstract and legal procedures . Indeed the experimental character of political engagement, so closely linked with revolutionary mind-sets, was in a constant search for some kind of nonreligious moral framework that could orient it. The evolving notion of “solidarity” provided one important scaffolding and, in doing so, also reconstituted a conceptual scheme upon whose interface the Christian Church could once again seek to reenter the public arena where this search for moral unity was being pursued. The commitment impelled by solidarity to common connectivity or good, based on human relatedness or the special moral claims of one group of needy persons—workers, the poor, families— joined with them elements of cohesion and moral specificity and rupture that, from one perspective, could reestablish consensus on an ethical basis, one now that called forth a particular service by citizen (including perhaps Christian citizen) and society both. Contemporary liberal theorists have not escaped the pull of this moral attraction that solidarity provided. We can leave aside the fact that the word “solidarity” has itself become a commonplace descriptor without much specificity any longer, except in rare instances. But the idea that a particular kind of social interest demands a particular kind of individual and, to some degree, demands also costly commitment, is generally shared even by procedural consensualists or simple proceduralists, or finally by those pluralists who do not even quite share the latter outlooks. Taking Nicholas Rescher as an exemplar of the last, we should note the way he characterizes an adequate and indeed necessarily effective political order. Rescher’s pluralism is radical in certain respects, although he argues for its boundedness within the “objective” (if often humanly misunderstood) natural world.2 Cognitive pluralism is, according to Rescher, basic and bound to the simple fact that all individuals perceive and know from within diverse experiential “sites,” both physically and temporally, as well as engage diverse physical and mental equipment. There is simply no way to organize coherently and exhaustively this diversity, and any theory or claim to do so is by definition overdetermined, while at the same time all knowing and the decisions based on such theories or claims are intrinsically ordered by ignorance of one kind or another. Rescher himself subscribes to the pragmatist approach to knowledge just on this basis, and it is one that, while it must remain ever 2 Rescher’s larger epistemological outlook is offered more systematically in his Metaphilosophical Inquiries, vol. 3 of A System of Pragmatic Idealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), in this case focused on philosophy as a discipline, something he sees as distinct from science, but some of the contrasts between the two are accessibly offered in this volume. Rescher is a Catholic, but his work has been applied by theologians mostly in the realm of interfaith relations. See S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference...

Share