I typically eschew twitter debates. How can one make the necessary moves in argument with a constraint like 140 characters? How do you develop an account of subtle differend (to use Lyotard's word) that is at once open and committed?
Today, though, I was inadvertently drug into one, which I promptly exited, over the contrasts between capitalism, socialism and distributism. This guy wanted to tell me Jesus was a socialist. I disagreed. But I couldn't develop my argument fast enough with just 140 characters.
Jesus does have a "preferential option for the poor". He speaks quite a bit about the kindness of the Gospel toward the disenfranchised. He condemns personal greed. But it's quite a jump from there to say he was a socialist. (Pro proto-socialist, at best. But even then I'm not sure.)
If Acts is any indication, the Church took such Kingdom economics seriously. Acts 5 comes immediately to mind. So picturing Jesus as a capitalist -- or depicting the church as largely supportive of capitalism -- is all off, too.
This short and short-lived debate this morning put me in mind again of an idea that's been banging around in my head the past few days. It involves the very nature of difference and debate.
Anybody who's spent time listening to folks knows you just can't put people into either-or boxes. There's too much shading, too many nuances, too much sublety. Our world, inherited as it is from the Enlightenment, loves compartmentalization. Making decisions and deciding which differences matter and which don't (which is always a power play on someone's part -- read Nietzsche) are the ways the world seems to work.
But after decades of lumping people together, we know it doesn't work out. Either-or logic fails us and effaces the differences that make us interesting, indeed that make us who we are.
And the problem is that the usual alternative -- both-and -- won't work either. When folks use both-and, I always watch for what they're trying to hide. Particularly the exclusions of privilege that promote such jolly inclusivity. At least with either-or those moves are obvious; either-or thrives on compartmentalizing. Both-and does too, though less obviously. Which makes it that much more insidious logically. There's less to push back on.
Either-or and both-and will neither one work. So what's an alternative?
Here's where it gets bulky and linguistically awkward. Bear with me.
I think the best alternative is both-but. It means operating from a principle of intellectual openness ("both"), while respecting the differences our intellectual commitments already affirm ("but").
There's probably something to be said on both sides of any impasse. But since we don't have all the options, we need to work out some alternative that meets in the middle. (Can you tell why I'm an Anglican?)
There's strength in the best of both proposals that requires a difference ("but"). A logical tertium quid.
This isn't a logical revolution like that of Lyotard or a linguistic revolution like that of Wittgenstein. But I'm trying to avoid the intellectual indifferentism that plagues so much public debate these days. All in the name of working together in order to find something else.