Over at the Hoover Institute, Tod Lindberg has a fascinating analysis of Jesus' Beatitudes. Unlike most sermons I've heard on the subject, Tod argues that Jesus is not promising "pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye", but giving very explicit commands for a new political and social order. After lifting my jaw off the keyboard, that a Stanford University's Hoover Institute would be allowed to publish what amounts to a lengthy Sunday sermon, I noticed a most interesting fact: Lindberg's linear analysis of the text closed in upon itself like a snake swallowing its tail. Lindberg had discovered recursion.

Regular readers of this post will know how fascinated I am by recursion, which in this case, occurs in a political context. As Providence would have it, I am just finishing an Edmund Burke biography, about the man responsible for much of the shape of modern political theory. From the Boston Tea Party to Madras to Belfast to Paris, Burke often found himself isolated by his habit of defending lost causes and attacking winning ones. A full 18 months before The Terror, when pro-Jacobin sentiment was most exuberant in London, Burke warned that the Revolution in France was not the blooming of a new rationalism, but the first step into anarchy and despotism. No one took him seriously. All considered him "over-the-top" in his macabre details of coming doom. But two years later, he was an acknowledged prophet.  How did Burke establish such a successful record of political prognostication, in an age without primaries, polls and the internet, in an age without TV and debates and campaigns?  I believe he did it by recursion.

In the last post, we talked of the necessity of a philosophy containing itself, and in previous posts, of science and of theology that contained itself. When a theory not only contains itself but the other two branches of knowledge-- Revelation, Experiment or Reason--I have called it Trinitarian. Only a Trinitarian approach, I argue, can avoid solipsism, can avoid sterility, can avoid stagnation. Only a Trinitarian approach can learn, can adapt, can progress without destroying itself, just as the Godhead is forever in conference, forever communicating yet forever unchanged.

Beatitudes

Now we look at politics, at the Beatitudes and see a similar Trinity, revealed by recursion. Lindberg begins his analysis by noticing that the nine Beatitudes are sorted by their level of social engagement (Matthew 5):

1) Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
2) Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
3) Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
4) Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
5) Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
6) Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
7) Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
8) Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
9) Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The "poor in spirit" are disengaged, depressed, "mourning" is a little more public despair, "meek" is at least defined by a social interaction albeit passive, "hunger and thirst" is an active social interaction, "mercy" is a pro-active social interaction, and "pure in heart" is an entire lifestyle toward others that includes mercy.  Here's Lindberg on #7, "peacemaking":

After the “pure in heart” come “the peacemakers.” Jesus’s intention here is clearly broad, encompassing not only relations between nations and peoples but also all subsets of conflict, down to those between two people. Here we take another step outward. If purity of heart relates to how I govern my own conduct toward others, peacemaking has the potential to take me outside myself.
It may be that the peace I am trying to make is between me and someone else. In that case, I am seeking to remove from my own conduct the sources of conflict between me and you. But I have to go farther, to recruit another to the cause of peace — to persuade another that the benefits of peace are sufficiently great to justify the other ’s removal of internal impediments to it and then to provide the other with the benefits of peace once it has been made.

Lindberg then draws out the implications of this 7th beatitude, arguing that the social aspects reveal it to be a large-scale political undertaking, greater than all the other commands before it. It is an argument from silence, and yet I find it strangely compelling.

Jesus does not say specifically whether he refers to peace between and among individuals, families, tribes, societies, nations, or some other grouping. His lack of specificity invites the conclusion that he is referring to all of these levels of peacemaking. What if there is a conflict between the requirements of peace among individuals or families, for example, and the requirements of peace between nations? As an illustration, think of the American Civil War, in which, famously, brother sometimes fought against brother. Or think of Sophocles ’s story of Antigone, who was caught between her obligation to obey the command of her king and her obligation to provide a proper burial for her brother. If a broad peace is truly possible, there will have to be a way of eliminating or reconciling such conflicts.

Up until now, the growing engagement with society has been one-sided, pro-active, but in the eighth beatitude, we see a push-back, a response. Whereas it may be noble and engaged to sponsor the Oslo accords, it is quite another level to be the recipient of suicide bombers. Thus the stakes of societal engagement are raised even further.

Jesus next mentions “those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.” In this group, we find those whose desire for right has been translated into action — the pursuit  in the world of what is right in some fashion that is perceptible to others in the way mere “hunger and thirst,” or desire, is not. Perhaps it is by demanding right treatment for themselves or for others. In any case, persecution may follow — from those whose wishes stand to be thwarted by the ones demanding what is right. The demand for righteousness comes as a threat to the advantage some enjoy over others. Those who have the advantage may take action to protect what they have — what they think of, erroneously, according to the Jesusian teaching, as rightly theirs. Of course, it is quite possible that those trying to be peacemakers will find themselves in this position, their efforts having failed not for want of trying but because they have given offense to those with the power to persecute.

Now, I would have thought that engagement can't get any worse than this. What does #9 add to the chain--victory, final goal, vision? No, recursion.

Last mentioned are “you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. ” Jesus reserves pride of place for the followers of his teaching. That’s because he believes his teaching is true. Considered as such, his teaching is the highest possible expression of righteousness. Jesus is perfectly aware that those who take his message to heart, act on it, and espouse it to others may run great risks in doing so. After all, his teaching is based on the proposition that people ’s hunger and thirst for righteousness can be universally satisfied, which in turn threatens those for whom vindication of their own, erroneous sense of right comes only at the expense of others. Such overlords are apt to resist.

For the persecution is now tied back to the message Jesus brings, and the message began with oppression, with the "poor in spirit". Not only is the ninth beatitude self-referential, but its reward is also recursive. Lindberg explains again.

Jesus promises possession of “the kingdom of heaven” to those in two of his categories: the poor in spirit and those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. As for those who run afoul of the overlords because they are following his teaching, he says “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. ”
Jesus seems to be suggesting that the prophets’ reward is great because they anticipated the message he brings. As for “rejoice and be glad,” we must ask what the alternative is: to be ground down by the persecution one must suffer; to give up; to let go of the message of Jesus and to wallow, paralyzed, in one ’s despair; to become poor in spirit. In the Beatitudes, we have before us a full circle of good conduct, a complete typology of the “good person” or “good soul” (taking soul in the this-worldly sense of the part of a person that is not merely body) — from the lowest of the low (who harm no one but themselves) to the most exalted (those persecuted for their actions on behalf of what ’s right).
It is no accident that the first category of the blessed, the poor in spirit, and the eighth and ninth, the persecuted, have in common the promised reward of heaven. Jesus is under no illusion about the difficulty of the advance of his message in this world. For some — those who have given up and those who are persecuted — he can promise no earthly reward at all (though he does promise a heavenly one). This is a harsh pronouncement, and we must not shrink from it.

Lindberg spots the recursion, the "full circle", but perhaps doesn't appreciate its significance. For the Beatitudes are a political theory that contains itself, it is a prescription that morphs itself, for as society obeys it more and more, there will be less and less persecution.

Do these Beatitudes then make themselves obsolete? Maybe, says Lindberg, for if the persecuted crack, if they despair, then they go back to step #1, but if they succeed, then they have ushered in the New Jerusalem, and appropriately, their reward is heaven. Lindberg apparently thinks such a Millennial kingdom is possible, and he ends on that optimistic note. (RTWT).

I find, however, neither a closed circle nor a finished ring, but a helix, a spiral staircase endlessly circling, yet endlessly advancing. This keeps us both from the Arminian despair that we may slip and like Tantalus, tediously begin at stage #1 anew, and from the post-Millennial enthusiasm that so pervaded Christendom at the opening of the 20th century. The Church is not wedded to one particular form of political government representing the perfect embodiment of the Beatitudes. The Church is not best expressed in a feudal society like Medieval Europe and Russia, nor in a Monarchy like the French, nor a constitutional Monarchy like the British Empire, nor even as a constitutional republic like the American Empire. Each of these are landings on the spiral staircase of history, stages on the ladder to heaven, but they are not heaven itself.

Conservatives

And this is what Burke believed and Burke pleaded as he reshaped Britain into the modern parliamentary form of government. We do not, as the French attempted, define the perfect world and cast away all restraint, all custom to obtain it. Nor do we suppress dissent by law or force, as the Brits treated Ireland. Rather we take our present circumstances and make a step in the right direction, choosing carefully so that what we let go of is not worth holding on to. Or at least, that is how Russell Kirk interprets the caution of Burke's approach, which lent the name "Conservatism" to the reconstituted Whig and Tory parties. The opposite of Conservative is not Liberal (which is a relatively modern invention) but Progressive. It is not surprising, then, that Hillary Clinton eschews the negative connotations of Liberal and would rather use the older, Progressive label.

But here I would disagree with both Kirk and Clinton. The problem is not that Progressives want to do away with the past as they strive for the Utopian future, the problem is one of recursion. The same reform-minded changes that Progressives want to use in their campaign speeches, would be disastrous if used on themselves. That is, change never can be an end in and of itself, because the change of change is not more change but stasis, death. So the one thing that cannot change is the slogan that everything else must change. The one aspect of the Progressive party that must not be permitted to progress is the very concept of progress. And, other than being hopelessly inconsistent, there are lots of corollary things that go along with protecting Progress, including protecting one's own political power, protecting one's power base, etc. Thus Progressive parties inevitably become about as progressive as the Chinese Central Committee, or Russia's Communist Party--dinosaurs.

What Burke or Conservatism provide us, is the attribute of building in recursion in politics. Burke's complaint about the way George III treated the colonies, is that he denied them the rights of Englishmen. In other words, if George III and George Washington had traded places, would it still be a fair law? If Irish Catholics were to change places with Irish Anglicans, would the laws of Ireland still be fair? If Madras rajah's were to trade places with East India governors, would India still function? The purpose of government, of political parties, is to be independent of the individuals that make them up. Or in Burke's words, the individuals are foolish, the species are wise.

The danger of the Jacobins and the revolution in France, was that it was ideological, and not recursive. The revolutionaries abused their privileges, so that when they fell from power, they indeed were subjected to the same violence they had used. Hence, the Terror. Such has been the property of all totalitarian parties, be they Jacobin, Bolsheviks, National Socialists, Labor or Progressives. None of them are recursive, or as they would say in physics, invariant under reflection.

Millennialists

But Jesus' Beatitudes operate in the political sphere on the revolutionary assumption that those in power begin with those out of power, that political actions must be identical to private actions, that we should behave in a way that makes every action the same if we reverse the parties. Lindberg thinks that this ends with a world in no need of peacemaking, in a world without persecution, and therefore a political system that makes itself obsolete. But I would suggest that this is not the case. Instead, we end up in a world where the politics leads to religion. That is, Jesus begins with a religion that revolutionizes politics, and ends with a world where politics revolutionizes religion.

Let us use Egypt as a typical example. Since the infamous Yom Kippur war and the resulting 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the US has supported Egypt with subsidies amounting to $2 billion annually, so for example, in 2004 the US provided $575M in economic and $1.3 billion in military aid. This largess has propped up a military dictatorship who is highly unpopular at home, making US also highly unpopular. Consequently elections in Egypt are always rigged to keep the opposition Islamic party (e.g. Moslem Brotherhood) out of power, for the good reason that the instant it is elected it will negate whatever democracy still exists. Hamas is an example of a rather undemocratic party (squashing opposition demonstrations) that was elected democratically. The joke about the Middle East is that they believe in one-man, one-vote, one-time. Democracy is not a recursive political system because the one thing it does not permit for the majority to rule is its own existence. To bring democracy to Egypt it takes more than foreign aid, or a colonial import, it takes an Afghanistan, it takes an Iraq. And in the process, the religion is changed.

So if Lindberg's thesis is that Jesus' political science will result in a Millennialist government, that government cannot be Democratic. On the other hand, Democracy is much closer to the ideal than the present Middle Eastern despotism. So what do we do? Do we abandon Democracy because it is imperfect, and call out the dogs of war to institute a more utopian and perfect French Republic? No, Burke explains how it works.  You make one loop around the Beatitude cycle of steps, and discover new ills that you never would have expected on the first go round. For example, the American founding fathers assumed freedom of religion applied to "protestant, catholic and jewish"; if you had suggested "mohammedan" to them, they would have said, "absolutely not!" So here we are in 2007 trying to decide if taxi drivers in Minneapolis can discriminate based on Islamic sharia law. What do we do? Time for another loop around "blessed are the poor in spirit".

For each time we make a loop, we transform those aspects of society that have persecuted us, and uncover new groups that are "poor in spirit". In this case, the new groups are Islam. And so this cycle of Beatitudes will not rest until it has transformed Islam itself. Will it require the conversion of Muslims to Christianity? Perhaps not, but it will require the reformation of Islam, it will require the conversion to Christendom. The Crusades were bent on conquest and conversion by force, but Islam did it better. Jesus' Beatitudes describe a different kind of conquest, one that we are seeing unfold today. In Burke's day the Irish Catholics were little more than Moors, and India's Hindus a little less, it made no difference to him, all men are under the rule of heaven. This is the true application of recursion in politics. This is surely a true meaning of the Beatitudes.

The recursion is long, the recursion is difficult, but the final goal of that spiral staircase is heaven itself.