Virtue Ecclesiology

An Exploration in The Good Church

John Fitzmaurice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317001478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Critiquing a paradigm of growth within the church, this book contends that the church's growth ethic should be replaced by one based on virtue. Drawing on the work of Sennett, Fromm, and Hauerwas, John Fitzmaurice argues that an approach taking growth to be the overriding task of the church is found to be shallow and risks infantilising the faith it purports to proclaim. MacIntyre's proposal for a recovery of a virtue-based ethic is examined and interpreted theologically through the concepts of narrative theology, community, sacraments and sanctification; the role of 'practices' in developing virtuous character is central. The nature of a virtuous organisation is explored through a lens of organisational psychodynamics; this understanding informs a model of church as a community of interpretation. Fitzmaurice suggests that it is in and though sacramental practices that the transitional space for these virtues to be formed is created. Tracing a similar corrosion of character within secular institutions that have opted for an overriding focus on growth, this book offers an alternative based on the formation of corporate, as well as individual, virtuous character and considers the implications of a virtue-based growth ethic on theological education and ministerial formation as well as in terms of public theology and the manner of the church's engagement with society.

Chapter 1
Foundationalism and the Corrosion of Character

Introduction

It is a truism to say that every generation believes that it lives in an age of significant change and upheaval of one kind or another. Those living over the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first century have as good a claim as any to such a description, and one of the crises of our age is a crisis of epistemology – how do we discern what is real, what is true, what is authentic, what is foundational?

This crisis has come to a head in the last two decades of the twentieth century which saw the emergence of a new and aggressive form of financial ideology and its rooting as foundational within the political discourse of the United States, the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. Many different terminologies have been used to describe this ideology – Free-Market Capitalism being perhaps the most common. In both the US and the UK many named it after the administrations that introduced it: thus in the US it became known as ‘Reaganomics’ and in the UK it is generally referred to as ‘Thatcherism’ – though its influence was to outlast both the leaders who oversaw its introduction. The sociologist Richard Sennett, who has tracked the corrosive effects of the failures of this approach and whose work we will explore below, simply describes it as the New Capitalism.

By the mid-1980s western society had reached a point where the dominance of the Free Market and its role as foundational in that society was seen as unassailable – people’s right to choose was sacrosanct. This led to an interpretation of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dismantling of the USSR as being a victory of the western foundational ideology of free markets over that of the foundationalism of the state within the Soviet Union. So comprehensive was this victory seen to be that the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously described it as ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989). Little did he know!

The speed of the rise of the New Capitalism was matched only by the speed of its decline. In 2008 the world economy was hit by a huge banking crisis that originated in the American ‘sub-prime’ mortgage market. In a matter of weeks it became clear that the king had no clothes and that the banks simply did not have the reserves to cover their liabilities – the New Capitalism was seen to have overreached itself and this led to economic meltdown. Thus the world generally and western society in particular now finds itself somewhat adrift as it begins the second decade of the twenty-first century. The two prevailing foundational ideologies that have contested to regulate its life in the latter half of the twentieth century (Capitalism and Communism) both seem to have failed, and as yet there is no obvious new model to replace either of them, there are no new foundations. Once again it can be said that we live in an age of anxiety.

It is my contention that a not dissimilar process has gone on within the church. I suggest that the church has become enculturated within the New Capitalism that has dominated British society in recent years as it has sought a foundational rationale for its faith and practice. Part of this process has been consciously undertaken while other aspects have been unconsciously absorbed. Generally, however, I suggest that this process, in both its conscious and its unconscious aspects, has been indiscriminate and at times collusive. This has led to the ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett 1998) that has been seen in the institutions and organisations of the wider society taking its toll on the character of the church as well. This chapter seeks to map that corrosion of character both in society and in the church, while the following chapter will seek to understand why this indiscriminate enculturation took place and propose a more appropriate model for the church’s engagement with society.

Character, Society and the New Capitalism

Let me suggest at the outset that what we are witnessing at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is the failure of foundationalism. Almost without exception those institutions which society deemed to be foundational to its functioning have collapsed, from the meta-narratives of communism and capitalism to the institutions on which they were co-dependent, the banks, parliament (including any real sense of participatory democracy), and more recently the media and the police.

We will examine the philosophical roots of foundationalism in more detail in the following chapter, suffice it to say at this point to say that foundationalism was and is the search for a solid foundation on which an epistemology or method of understanding society and how we live could be built. From its Cartesian origins there have been numerous attempts and disagreements over what these foundations might be (and one of the characteristics of foundationalism is its ability to cast itself anew at great speed – ‘if that isn’t the foundation, then this must be’). However, the one thing that all hypothesised foundations would seem to have in common is the fact that they have failed to deliver – indeed much postmodern philosophy would suggest that the search for an epistemological foundation was fruitless and in vain.

The Failure of 'Growth' as the Prevailing Foundational Paradigm

Perhaps the dominant foundational paradigm of the New Capitalism has been that of economic growth. Actions are validated simply on the basis of their ability to yield growth, yet there were within the New Capitalism few criteria to assess whether or not that growth was a good thing – the New Capitalism abandoned any teleological concept of society or humanity for simplistic and short-term economic gain. Yet what the financial crash of 2008/9 has taught us is that not all growth is good, something the medical world has been well aware of for some time. Indeed it is not too farfetched to see much of the growth produced by the New Capitalism as cancerous, an attitude of mind that permeated and spread throughout our society. This abandonment of any teleological vision for society and individuals reached its zenith when Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that there was no such thing as society, though this claim has been subject to some recent revisionist interpretations. Yet the paradigm of growth and increased productivity has permeated not just the financial and commercial sectors of our society, but also the service sector particularly in the areas of education and health; indeed the very process of government has become dominated by it.

Few people have documented the corrupting effect of the dominance of market-based and statist-based ideologies more vividly than Phillip Blond in his book Red Tory (2010).¹ Blond lays the breakdown of British civil society at the feet of the neo-liberal economic policies of both the Thatcher and Blair governments and their successors, and the statist infrastructures that developed to police these policies, which has led to an ‘uncritical alliance between state and the market’ (p. 4). This has been brought about by the disappearance of all other sources of independent autonomous power (p. 4). The symptoms he describes in graphic, if somewhat inflated, terms are:

increasing fear, lack of trust and abundance of suspicion, long-term increase in violent crime, loneliness, recession, depression, private and public debt, family break-up, divorce, infidelity, bureaucratic and unresponsive public services, dirty hospitals, powerlessness, the rise of racism, excessive paperwork, longer and longer working hours, children who have no parents, concentrated and seemingly irremovable poverty, the permanence of inequality, teenagers with knives, teenagers being knifed, the decline of politeness, aggressive youths, the erosion of our civil liberties, and the increase of obsessive surveillance, public authoritarianism, private libertarianism, general pointlessness, political cynicism and a pervading lack of daily joy. (Blond 2010, p. 1)

Central to Blond’s diagnosis is his assertion that the cause of the internal collapse of British civil society was the capturing of the working classes within a culture of dependency on the state. Paradoxically, he suggests, the welfare state that purported to support and help the poor ultimately only served to rob them of their motivation to work and organise for a better life, thus holding them within a culture of dependency.

This new configuration of state and citizen made the populace a supplicant citizenry dependent on the state rather than themselves, and it aborted indigenous traditions of working-class self help, mutuality and social insurance … In this way, welfare ceased to function as a safety net through which people could not fall, becoming instead a ceiling through which the supplicant class – cut off from earlier working-class ambition – could not break.(Blond 2010, p. 15)

This has led to a situation where the rich become richer through the ‘gains’ of rampant growth while the poor remain trapped in welfare dependency. Blond suggests that the breakdown of British society can be seen in three keys area: economic, democratic and social.

The economic collapse is seen most clearly in the debt crisis that is both national and domestic. He cites the lack of domestic savings as an indication that we have become a short-termist society. The widely held principle of saving for retirement, of delayed gratification, has been destroyed. Democratically Blond traces the centralisation of political power to Westminster as indicative of a corruption or corrosion of the democratic principle. This leaves ordinary folk disengaged from the political process and their elected representatives. According to Blond, the localised civic and community life of Britain has well nigh disappeared. All of this has led to a series of low turnouts in general elections, never mind local elections. Blond says: ‘Parliamentary reform cannot be a substitute for political involvement: it must come as a result of a renewed participation (2010, p. 69). Not only is there a marked decline in political capital, but Blond also identifies a decline in social capital. This is characterised not least by the huge increase in both alcohol and substance abuse, and a related significant rise in criminality. Blond places the blame of all of this clearly at the door of the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Blond is equally bold in where he lays the blame for this corrosion of British society. He identifies two factors – 1) contemporary liberalism, and 2) poor third-level philosophy teaching! Liberalism, he contends, is too busy arguing about what is foundational and what isn’t. It disregarded any notion of objective truth and embraced at best relativism, which in turn became more oppressive than that which came before (p. 142), or at worst the notion that everything was arbitrary. We could describe this as the nihilism of post-foundationalism. He goes on: ‘Happily convinced by the radical import of this message, too many of our talented young people give up on the possibility of transformative politics and assiduously work their way into the managerial and governing class of our country’ (p. 140).

Blond’s analysis is significant as it places contemporary society at a tension between a foundationalism that hasn’t worked and is discredited, and a nihilism that is soul-destroying and demeaning of human life. He calls for a restoration of ethos at both individual and societal levels based on a retrieval of virtue.

Blond’s research on the UK echoes much of Robert Putnam’s earlier research in the US at the turn of the millennium (Putnam 2000) which showed a clear correlation between economic equality and Social Capital.² Putnam defines Social Capital as a measure of:

• social trust
• engagement with public affairs
• informal sociability
• community organisational life
• volunteerism.

Putnam also sees a growing culture of restructuring and outsourcing within workplaces that in turn has led to a loss of employee loyalty and the concept of a secure job for life. This has led to a short-termist attitude among the workforce something that, as we shall see, Richard Sennett believes to be of great significance. Putnam identified a decline in neighbourly visiting (2000, p. 106) and informal socialising (p. 108), along with club meetings, committee service, church attendance, philanthropic generosity and electoral turn out (p. 185). Putnam suggests that all forms of civic disengagement are concentrated in the young (p. 252). A few things, however, have bucked the trend – more people are attending spectator sports events and there has been a rise in phone calls and communication via email.

In the UK the New Economics Foundation (NEF) found that in the first five years of the new millennium six post offices were closed per week and between 1995 and 2000 the UK lost 20 per cent of its most vital community institutions (cornershops, for example) (Potts et al. 2006). The same report found that 87 per cent of Britons think that society is too materialistic and that levels of trust have halved since the 1950s. It found that 62 per cent of Britons have jobs that they find too stressful or uninteresting and 40 per cent of incapacity benefit claims in the UK are caused by mental illness.

All of this has taken place within a culture of free-market foundationalism, and whereas undoubtedly many have gained from the huge advances of the past 30 years it is important to hear the voices of those who haven’t. Many would suggest that the social fabric of our society is in an even poorer state than it was during the economic traumas of the 1970s.

Numerical and Statistical Auditing

One of the victories of free-market foundationalism has been its influence on the auditing mechanisms employed in a wide variety of contexts in society – vast amounts of statistical data are produced while the destruction of social cohesion is ignored. Indeed, numerical and statistical auditing is one of the central characteristics of the New Capitalism – it is the new foundation; however, in its disregard for the reality of any human dynamics it is also nihilistic.³

Statistical auditing has its origins in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. David Boyle (2001) describes Bentham’s approach as extreme, pointing to his belief that good could be calculated and that everything in the world needed to be measured to calculate its worth. Bentham’s disciples John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes both moderated this position.⁴ Charles Handy has criticised such approaches calling them ‘the fallacy of the single criterion’:

Trying to find one number that is the sum of everything is misguided. There is never any one number that will actually explain success in life and we are foolish to ever to think that it might be there. Money certainly isn’t it. Businesses know very well that profit is not the only measure. Sensible organisations now have about 18 different numbers that they look at. Nevertheless, the myth pervades our society that if you are profitable you are successful. Or if you’re in the public sector, then efficiency is what matters. But efficiency is not quite the same as effectiveness. You can have a very efficient hospital if you don’t take in very sick people or people who are not going to get better, like old ones. So you push them outside. You’re efficient but you’re not terrible effective. Looking for the one number has corrupted our society. (Handy, cited in Boyle 2001 p. 59)

Yet Bentham’s ideas did not totally disappear. Boyle cites the Tory party conference of 1954 when it was stated that it would now be possible to plan ‘utopia’. This planning was to be based around indicators for growth and strict cost-benefit analysis on all projects. It could be argued that such an approach is still deeply influential to policy making today. Boyle points out nine weakness of such an approach that are of such significance that they are worth quoting in detail (2001, pp. 45ff.):

1. ‘You can count people, but you can’t count individuals’: such approaches leave no recognition for diversity; no room for people who don’t conform and the reality is that people aren’t simply average.
2. ‘If you count the wrong thing you go backwards’: Boyle points to the detrimental effect auditing has had on education, with children excluded from exams simply to make league table scores look good; and in the health service complex operations avoided in favour of more straight-forward ones.
3. ‘Numbers replace trust, but make measuring even more untrustworthy’: most people are aware that auditing exposes failure, but most people are also aware that audits do not capture the whole picture of that being audited and so distrust the evidence. Few people then trust the evidence of audits in the long run.
4. 'When mmibers fail we get more numbers': auditing more things doesn't lead to a clearer picture. When auditing certain things fails simply switching the focus on what is being audited does not solve the problem.
5. 'The more we count, the less we understand': Boyle is keen to point out that numbers are not as objective as many think they are. Figures can be interpreted in a variety of ways and don't lead to an objective unassailable truth.
6. 'The more we actually count, the more unreliable the figures': Boyle suggests that many figures 'are an unusual amalgam of the precise and the arbitrary' (p. 51).
7. 'The more we count, the less we can compare the figures': he suggests that the correlation of statistics is often illogical and misleading.
8. 'Measurements have a monstrous life of their own': targets are used to oppress people.
9. 'When you count things they get worse': drawing too much attention to an issue can affect it negatively: for example, people think the main purpose of going to church is to bolster congregational numbers.

Boyle’s critique is helpful as it clearly identifies the failures of a foundational approach to numerical and statistical auditing, an approach that is endemic in our society and indeed the church.

Positive Psychology

Another, and perhaps one of the more bizarre, offshoots of the free-market economy, has been its relationship with positive psychology.⁵ The overriding and ulti...