New Humanism as Retro Theology?

Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote a column in the NY Times arguing that it is time to rethink our contemporary conception of human nature. (Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage). He thinks that we, with the "we" being the US I suppose, are overly reliant on a rational account of human nature, one that separates thinking from the emotions. I'd sum it up using Plato: Plato believed that knowing the good leads to doing the good. Our emotions need to be ignored, given over to knowledge, as truth has the power to move the rational part of our soul towards enacting truth. For Brooks, this assumption shapes our view about education, the role of the media, the power of advertisements and institutions like Consumer Reports. They give us rational facts that we rationally comprehend and use to make informed choices in the world. Well, Brooks rightly is criticizing this rational approach, saying it led to Wall Street debacle and a number of foreign policy messes.

He aims to use the research of a variety of social and hard sciences to suggest a much deeper link between thinking and the emotions that will help reform our conception of human nature. For this goal, I am thankful, as I do think that we are too overly reliant on trusting people like economists and policy gurus to rationally explain why we should follow a certain course of action. From Tea Party folk to Union Leaders, the trust in human thinking to address contemporary problems (budget deficits, collective bargaining rights) makes it seem that objectivity and certainty is possible. He also goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment as a means to find a link between reason and the emotions, and includes terms like sympathy, metis (to see patterns in the world) and limerence (a hunger for transcending time/world/things). Doesn't limerence just sound cool and fun to say, like it belongs in a poem or song?

I want to go further back though to two foundational Christian assumptions, two that many of us don't like to talk about: sin and love. A major element in Christianity, especially post-Augustine (4-5th CE), is the idea that we are trapped in a nature that fundamentally loves itself more than God and others. Self-love shapes our thinking and actions in the world, such that our thoughts are related to our aims, goals, hopes and desires. We are biased for our own idea of the good, successes, aims, advantages. So with this view, any "rational" choice is intertwined with emotion, with our desires and hopes. I do think one element of the genius of Christianity is that sin is a powerfully descriptive term about human nature, one that should make us cautious about certainty, confidence and the power of our knowledge.

So I would like to remind Mr. Brooks that there are traditions that do see the intertwining of reason and emotions. Christian loved-grounded-thinking does not mean we can't use reason to make sense of things in the world, just that we will never be objective or truly empathetic towards others in a way that will make for equality and the common good. True peace and community comes in relationship to God and from God. We need to properly see ourselves as limited, thereby opening ourselves up to working communally to address the problems we face. And it is through communal action that our self-love can be mitigated, limited and our thinking made "better." And it is through a faith tradition like Christianity that we receive a truer sense of being human, both what we are and what we should be. As we Christians begin the fast of Lent, may we use it to remind ourselves of the limits to our thinking.