the Way of the Citizen

how individual spiritual freedom (new Culture) can transform social existence
out of the cooperative arts of the social commons

by Joel A. Wendt

introduction

"render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesars..."

We are all Citizens of the World.   This is the inescapable fact of modern existence, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.  What is called in economic language - globalization - is simply a by-product of a world-wide cultural transformation.  The Culture of Media has woven us together, and we can no longer remain immune to the woes and sufferings of our sisters and brothers all over the world.

This change, pushing us into an awareness of our common trials and struggles, is part of and partly responsible for another change.  Western Civilization is foundering, and in its last days.  We live in a time of escalating social chaos - everyone can see this who is paying the least attention to the reports generated by the Culture of Media.  

As Citizens, whether we admit it formally or not, we are demanding of our world that it conform to our opinions of what it should be.  But few of these opinions agree, with the result that our combined insistence - that the world be how we want it to be  - has more of a pulling apart (destructive) effect, then it does a creative cooperative effect.  We are rendering unto Caesar (our shared social-political reality) too many self-centered demands, and too few sacrifices to the whole.

This small book is intended to help the reader find insights into the hows, whys and whats of building community in this time of social chaos.  It is an assumption of this book that we live in a time in which the general social order is experiencing ever more rapid decay and even death.  This will be no small problem for a great many people; and, the hope of this book is to stimulate the reader's thinking about the nature of our social existence, what culture really is, how culture influences the political and the economic, and a number of quite significant related questions.

This book is also meant to be a companion piece to "the Way of the Fool: the conscious development of human character and the Future* of Christianity - some thoughts on the nature of human becoming (the evolution of consciousness) and the wise relationship of moral grace, freedom and love".  In that book the main emphasis is on the inner life of the human being in relationship to the Divine Mystery, and the relationship of this same inner life to our individual outer biography, as we participate in the shared social world (also known as the Mystery of Evil).

In the Way of the Fool we worked mostly from the point of view of the individual, while in the Way of the Citizen we are working mostly on the community-social.  In each case we are working from the individual outward.  In the Way of the Citizen we are dealing with what Christ meant we he advised us to "...render unto Caesar...", just as in the Way of the Fool we mostly delt with how "...to render unto God...".  There is a reason for this.

Civilization has both an inside and an outside.  Most of us really only pay attention to the outsides, as if that was the important matter.  Such outsides would include the level of technology, how the social order is maintained, what are the traditional structures of family and community, how education is conducted, what is done with the arts and similar questions.  These are not unimportant questions, but their true answers lie deeper than these surface phenomena.

The true reality of Civilization is found in the insides.  To grasp this we only need to observe ourselves, as examples of the typical human being.  Through the senses we experience the world of outsides.  Only in our inner life do we experience that which causes the outsides to have the character they present to our senses.  The insides determine the nature of the outsides.

Yes, for many readers this will not seem obvious, but again think on how it is that on an almost daily basis people see you, and only see your outsides, that is your behavior.  They do not see your suffering, for example, or your fear.  Yet, each of us knows that it is the inner experiences, the fear, the suffering, the hunger, the wants, the desires, the hopes - a whole vastness of inner realities that determines outer behavior.  This inner world is the place where the outer world is born, and as we will see in the following chapters, it is this inner realm that has itself already undergone transformation in such a way that the outer world of social form - what we call civilization in its broadest sense - this world of social form is what we are all experiencing as falling apart.

For example, people talk today of culture wars, and not to long ago of the family values crisis.  Others speak of the loss of civility, and still others of a "me" generation.  All of these observations, each in its own way are quite valid, represent partial pictures of something happening on a much larger scale - in fact on such a scale that we really have to speak of the Fall of Western Civilization (or perhaps better said: the metamorphosis of Western Civilization into something entirely new).

Of course, here in the introduction we are simply giving a preview of themes that will be more fully explored later.  Lets consider a couple more.

Language...

"The Tower of Babel is not about fracture of a single language into diverse mutually-incomprehensible language, each rigid in its 
literalness. It is about the loss of the magical, allegorical common ground which unites the One Humanity in what lives between the lines of the written, the legal, and about the anesthetization of the talents (Latin Taleo, to lie deep or hidden) of picturing imagination, riverrun of inspiration process, and gesture, pierce of intuition, which now "wish to reemerge" in human life. These are the luminous, majestic spectral gifts of awe and spice to which we have to look joyously forward to bringing back, each of us a Marco Polo, in our voyages across the Threshold." (Harvey Bornfield 1945-2006)