In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II, I tried to give an indication of what I mean by saying I am a neo-Manichaean. The ancient pseudo-Christian heresy, Manichaeanism, posits (as I understand it) a God who is all-good but not (and herein lies the heresy) all-powerful, such that His struggle with Satan is ongoing. That translates, in my version of the story, into a world where order and chaos square off to create the "edge of chaos," where evolution develops its outcomes good and bad, there are new species and extinctions, and there are multitudinous births and deaths, for better or for worse.
We have at least three possible responses, the two most obvious of which are not what I urge.
Perhaps the most obvious of the three possible responses is a studied, even principled amorality. If God and the Devil are roughly equipotent, why choose sides? I find that a copout both repugnant and ridiculous. After all, good is, by definition, better than evil.
The second most obvious of the three possible responses is to go to the opposite extreme and seek — nay, insist on — moral purity. Extirpate all reflections of Satan from the circumstances of our lives.
That, too, I reject; this post discusses why. But first, here is the third option, the one I favor: Understanding and dealing squarely with the fact that, in life as we live it, goodness and purity are not the same things.
A good way to illustrate what I mean comes from the recent book by The New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.
Beinart is not talking about religion, philosophy, or theology, but about political ideology. His book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears in the earliest days of the Cold War.
It was a time just after World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Communist Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, had gobbled up Eastern Europe and begun to prove itself, under Stalin, as totalitarian as the Nazi and Fascist enemies we had just defeated together. Many on the American left were themselves Communists, ex-Communists, aligned in some way with Socialism/Marxism, fellow-travelers, or dupes.
In the years from 1946 to 1948, there was a bifurcation between leftists who were willing to shortchange liberty in favor of equality and fraternity, and those who weren't. The latter group formed Americans for Democratic Action, underwrote the Truman presidency, and laid the foundation for the anti-totalitarian American liberalism to come — that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the like.
Not long thereafter was born the anti-Communist right, led by such thinkers as James Burnham and National Review founder William F. Buckley. They did not approve of Truman's emphasis on foreign and military aid. Economic assistance to floundering nations in the postwar period, countries such as Greece and Turkey whose governments, albeit anti-Soviet, were not model democracies, would, they said, just undermine our chances of winning the Cold War. Why? They betrayed our lack of moral purity and clarity.
The anti-Communist right embarked on a series of domestic witch hunts, led by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-57. "For the right," writes Beinart (p. 20), "the question lurking behind all these cases [of alleged Communist sympathies] was whether America believed in its creed strongly enough to expel those who did not." For the anti-Communist left, on the other hand, the point was exactly the reverse: America needed to be strong enough to tolerate espousers of even those ideologies most adversarial to it. Anything less would mock liberty, not strengthen it.
It came down to a recognition by the liberal anti-totalitarians that America's goodness was not the same as its moral purity. "If the cold war liberal tradition parts company with the right," says Beinart (p. xi), "in insisting that American power cannot be good unless we recognize that it can also be evil, it parts company with the purist left in insisting that if we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good."
Moral purism thus has its left- and right-wing versions. Many left-wingers have traditionally objected to pragmatic, half-a-loaf policies that aren't squeaky clean, social justice-wise. Right-wingers, to those that leave something to be desired, liberty-wise.
This is just as true in the international sphere as on the domestic scene. The dust jacket of The Good Fight says, "Peter Beinert offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure ... ."
For God, of course, there is no distinction between goodness and moral purity. For us, there is. How can this be?
Here is where my understanding of neo-Manichaeanism enters the picture. If God, the supernatural source of good, is locked in battle with Satan, the bastion of evil, then we live in an edge-of-chaos world where the back-and-forth between order and chaos can't meaningfully be avoided. To try to quell the battle by unduly purifying our own little corner of the world, silencing or casting out all complexity or dissent, is ultimately self-defeating and counterproductive.
I am saying such things as if I find them easy to demonstrate the truth of and accept. The opposite is the case. My soul is actually torn between such an outlook and a strong preference for moral purity and clarity.
Little wonder. Embracing complexity and diversity is a lot harder than calling for purity and clarity.
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