Jean Vanier writes, "Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness."
Stanley Hauerwas writes, "To focus on gentleness does create a rhetorical problem. My style is polemical and many, I suspect, would not characterise my work as gentle or tender. Accordingly, I worry that my attempt to argue for the significance of gentleness for Vanier and L'Arche may betray what L'Arche is about. My only defence is that God has given us different tasks. My task has been to put Vanier's wisdom into conversation with philosophical and political positions I fear are antithetical if not outright threats to those we call intellectually disabled. That has meant, however, that my writing style is aggressive and confrontational."
I so resonate with Hauerwas' predicament! My style is polemical; my task has been to put Christ into conversation with philosophical and political positions that I fear are anithetical, if not outright threats to human flourishing!
"Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness." So writes Jean Vanier. Tenderness and gentleness characterise the life and work of Vanier, as well as that of L'Arche movement. Vanier observed that:
community is made of the gentle concern that people show each other
every day. It is made up of the small gestures, of services and
sacrifices which say "I love you" and "I am happy to be with you." It is
letting the other go in front of you, not trying to prove that you are
in the right in a discussion; it is taking the small burdens from the
other.
Gentle, the world of L'Arche is gentle, and I
want to explore here the politics of gentleness ― that is, why
gentleness is constitutive of any politics that would be just.
Gentleness
is usually the last thing most of us would associate with the rough and
tumble world of politics. Politics, we assume, is about conflict and/or
getting your interests satisfied. Gentleness is a characteristic of
personal relationships having little to do with questions of power or
rule. That is, of course, exactly the dichotomy I want to challenge by
calling attention to the role of gentleness in L'Arche.
To
focus on gentleness does create a rhetorical problem. My style is
polemical and many, I suspect, would not characterise my work as gentle
or tender. Accordingly, I worry that my attempt to argue for the
significance of gentleness for Vanier and L'Arche may betray what L'Arche
is about. My only defence is that God has given us different tasks. My
task has been to put Vanier's wisdom into conversation with
philosophical and political positions I fear are antithetical if not
outright threats to those we call intellectually disabled. That has
meant, however, that my writing style is aggressive and confrontational.
However,
I do not want the way I argue to belie the significance of gentleness.
Which means I hope I will prove to be an adequate listener because
learning to listen is basic to the gentle character of life in L'Arche.
But I am an academic and academics are notoriously bad listeners. We
always think we know what someone is going to say before they say
anything and we have a response to what we thought they would say in
spite of what they may have actually said. To learn to listen well it
turns out may require learning to be a gentle person.
That is particularly true if Vanier is right that to learn to listen can be quite painful. For example, Vanier observes:
Communities which start by serving the poor must gradually discover
the gifts that those poor people bring. The communities start in
generosity; they must grow to listen. In the end, the most important
thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but
to help them to have confidence in themselves ... Some communities grow
by listening to their members' needs for formation and well-being. This
growth is usually material: the communities go for the best and most
comfortable buildings, where everyone has their own room. These
communities will die fairly quickly. Other communities will grow by
listening to the cry of the poor. Most of the time, this leads them to
become poorer themselves, so that they can be closer to the poor people.
"Most of the time this leads them to become poorer
themselves." What might that mean if I am to listen to Vanier? I do not
want to become poorer. I want to remain the academic who can pretend to
defend those with mental disability by being more articulate than those I
am criticising. In short, I do not want to learn to be gentle. I want
to be a warrior on behalf of Vanier doing battle against the politics
that threaten to destroy his gentle communities. Vanier, of course, is
no less a warrior, but where I see an enemy to be defeated he sees a
wound that needs healing.
According to Vanier we all carry a deep
wound ― that is, the wound of our loneliness. That is why we find it
hard to be alone trying to heal our aloneness by joining a community.
But to belong cannot help but lead to disappointment. What we must
realise, Vanier insists, is that:
this wound is inherent in the human condition and that what we have
to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it
until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the
Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the centre of the wound.
This is the radical insight I take to be at the heart of Vanier and L'Arche,
making possible the gentleness that heals. The stories Vanier tells of
the handicapped are often stories of loneliness not easily overcome. For
example, he tells the story of Daniel whose disabilities were so severe
his parents did not want him, which meant after being put in one
institution after another he ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Vanier acknowledges even at L'Arche
he would now and again flip out of reality, "hiding his anguish and
himself behind hallucinations. He had constructed thick walls around his
heart that prevented him from being who he was. He felt guilty for
existing, because nobody wanted him as he was." Vanier observes that the
heart of a child is so easily hurt, and the hurt becomes a wound around
which we build walls of protection. Walls so constructed can only we
breached by gentleness.
Image:
Jean Vanier during a march on behalf of persons with disabilities in
France in 1992. (Photo by Pierre Michaud / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
The politics of gentleness
But what does this have to do with politics. I think it helps illumine why, as Hans Reinders
has argued, liberal political theory has found it difficult to provide
moral standing for people with mental disabilities. According to
Reinders, at the heart of liberal political arrangements is the
assumption that "individuals are free to live their own lives as they
prefer, provided that they allow other people equal freedom to do the
same, and provided that they accept and receive a fair share in the
burden and benefits of the social cooperation." But people with mental
disabilities from a liberal perspective are judged to lack to a greater
or lesser extent the powers of reasons and free will. Since these are
powers that bring substance to the core values of the liberal view of
public morality, mentally disabled people never acquire full moral
standing in this view. This is because its moral community is
constituted by "persons" and these, in turn, are constituted by the
powers of reason and free will. This conception of the person is
particularly problematic with respect to the inclusion of severely
mentally disabled citizens, since on the liberal view only persons in
the sense of rational moral agents can be recipients of equal concern
and respect.
I fear it may sound overly dramatic, but what
Reinders describes is what I take to be the wound that animates liberal
political theory and practice ― a wound, moreover, that is well
protected by walls not easily breached because they seem so reasonable.
It is to Martha Nussbaum's great credit that she has acknowledged that
liberal political theory, as exemplified in the work of John Rawls, has
difficulty recognising the status of the mentally disabled. In her book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Nussbaum observes, as Reinders argued,
that the parties assumed to have the status necessary to negotiate the
conditions of a just society "are human beings possessed of no serious
mental or physical impairments."
Nussbaum takes as her task to
remedy the failure of liberal political theory and practice to include
the disabled without abandoning the fundamental insights of liberalism.
She does so in the name of three mentally disabled people: Sesha, the
daughter of philosopher Eva Kittay and her husband Jeffrey, who will
never walk, talk or read because of her cerebral palsy and mental
retardation; Nussbaum's nephew Arthur, who is without any social skills
(Asperger's syndrome) and unable to learn in school but is mechanically
adept; and Jamie Bérubé, who was born with Down syndrome, and is the son of Michael Bérubé
and Janet Lyon, both literary critics. That Nussbaum names real people I
take to be an indication that this is not just a theoretical exercise
for her.
According to Nussbaum
at the heart of liberal political theory is the attempt to secure
social cooperation on the basis of mutual advantage for the contracting
parties. A "strong rationalism" informs the liberal project in the hope
that an account of political life can be justified that avoids as much
as possible appeals to intuitions and prejudices. Therefore liberalism
seeks to provide an account of justice that does not depend on the
presumption of altruism, but rather assumes an admittedly fictive
bargaining process that establishes fundamental principles of mutual
advantage.
Nussbaum does not call into question these fundamental
presuppositions of the liberal political project. Yet she acknowledges
that to so understand the character of justice has resulted in people of
disability being omitted from consideration. This is at least partly
the result of conflating the question, "By whom are society's basic principles designed?" with the question, "For whom
are society's basic principles designed?" Nussbaum thinks because these
questions are conflated liberal political theory ends with a
counter-intuitive result, because those with mental disability are
excluded. Such a result is counter-intuitive because, at least in our time:
the issue of justice for people with disabilities is prominent on the
agenda of every decent society, the omission of all of them from
participation in the situation of basic political choice looks
problematic, given the evident capacity of many if not all of them for
choice; and their omission from the group of persons for whom society's
most basic principles are chosen is more problematic still.
It would seem that all Rawls or other like-minded
liberal theorists need to do to respond to Nussbaum's concern for the
disabled is to let the parties that participate in the original
bargaining game know that some of them may have disabilities for which
provision will need to be made. But Rawls is unable to accept this
suggestion, Nussbaum argues, because if he did so he "would lose a
simple and straightforward way of measuring who is the least well-off in
society, a determination that he needs to make for purposes of thinking
about material distribution and redistribution, and which he makes with
reference to income and wealth alone." It is also the case that Rawls,
like the social contract tradition in general, simply does not take into
consideration impairments that are relatively rare.
Nussbaum
argues, therefore, that rather than focusing on income and wealth, as
Rawls does, a capabilities approach is necessary if the mentally
handicapped are not to be unfairly excluded. According to Nussbaum, to
focus on capabilities means that we are fundamentally bodily
beings whose rationality is but one aspect of our animality. Therefore
our "bodily need, including our need for care, is a feature of our
rationality and our sociability." To focus on capabilities means the
variation of needs can be respected making possible discriminations such
as why children need more protein than adults or, more generally, that
it is often the case that some need more care than others and why that
care must be individualised. Nussbaum thinks, moreover, such care is
rightly understood to be a matter of justice.
One cannot help but be sympathetic with Nussbaum's attempt to help us better appreciate the needs of the disabled. However, as Alan Ryan
points out, it is not clear that the concept of capabilities advances
the concept of justice. For the very notion of capabilities depends on
close analysis of practices that allow correlations to be made between
needs of a particular person and what will satisfy those needs. But that
kind of concreteness is not available as long as Nussbaum is determined
to maintain Rawls's liberal framework.
Ryan quite rightly
observes that it is not as if Nussbaum is not persuasive about the needs
and capacities of the disabled, but it is not clear why our, by which I
assume he means those of us who are not disabled, relation to the
disabled is a matter of injustice. What, Ryan asks:
would be lost by saying that the duties are stringent, inescapable,
and urgent, but not duties of justice? Nussbaum shows ― over and over ―
that no theory that explains justice as a contract for mutual advantage
will show that these duties toward the disabled are a matter of justice.
There may be little mutual advantage for the person who helps Arthur.
Do we need a different theory of justice or should we say that many
duties are grounded directly in the needs of beings to who duties are
owed, but are not a matter of justice? What difference does it make
which we say?
Nussbaum might well say in response it makes all the
difference what we say because if we do not understand what is done in
the care of Sesha, Arthur and Jamie, we may abandon them to a world that
cannot be trusted to care for them. They are lucky because they had
parents that cared, but what happens if you do not have parents that
care? Yet the problem with Nussbaum's attempt to provide a theory to
ensure that Sesha, Arthur and Jamie be cared for is that it is just that
― a theory. It is a theory, moreover, in which the wound of
loneliness is made a necessity in order that we might be protected from
one another.
In contrast, Reinders argues
that there is no point trying to argue with someone who is a sceptical
spectator that they should care about the disabled. Rather, it is
crucial for a liberal society that people exist who are willing to be engaged in the practice of caring for the disabled.
According to Reinders, no public policy or theory can resolve the
problem of what appears to be the burden of the lives of the disabled
unless "it can tap resources that motivate citizens to value the
commitment that it requires." For whatever significance can be found in
sharing one's life with another person, a significance that will usually
come as a surprise, cannot be found outside the activity itself.
Which finally brings me back to the gentleness that characterises the work of L'Arche. In an early essay entitled "L'Arche:
Its History and Vision," Vanier provides an account of how he became
Jean Vanier. He first met people with mental handicaps in 1963. Father
Thomas Phillipe, a Dominican priest, was a chaplain for a home of 30 men
in a small village called Trosly-Breuil. Vanier was teaching philosophy
at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, but through
Father Thomas he met and begin to live with Philippe and Raphael in a
Trosly. Vanier reports:
We began living together, buying food, cooking, cleaning, working in
the garden, etc. I knew really nothing about the needs of handicapped
people. All I wanted to do was to create community with them. Of course,
I did have a tendency to tell them what to do; I organised and planned
the day without asking what their opinion or desire. I suppose this was
necessary in some ways for we did not know each other and they came from
a very structured situation. But I had a lot to learn about listening
to the needs of handicapped people; I had a lot to discover about their
capacity to grow.
In short, Vanier had to be taught how to be gentle.
For it is not easy to learn to be gentle with the mentally disabled for
they also suffer from the wound of loneliness. Which means they too can
ask for too much, which means gentleness requires the slow and patient
work necessary to create trust. Crucial for the development of trust is
that assistants discover the darkness, brokenness and selfishness shaped
by their loneliness. According to Vanier, through the struggle required
for us to discover that we are like the mentally handicapped — wounded —
we discover how much "we need Jesus, and his Paraclete. For without
them we cannot enter into this life of compassion and communion with our
weaker brothers and sisters."
In case anyone wonders if Vanier recognised the political implications of what he was learning, he tells us that through his contact with men and women with intellectual disabilities:
I discovered then how divided and fragmented our societies are. On
the one hand are those who are healthy and well-integrated into society;
on the other are those who are excluded, on its margins. As in
Aristotle's day, there are still masters and slaves. I realised that
peace could not prevail while no attempt was made to span the gulf
separating different cultures, different religions, and even different
individuals.
Jean Vanier wrote his dissertation on Aristotle. He
knows well that Aristotle thought the test of any good polity was
revealed by its ability to sustain friendship between people of virtue.
Aristotle, however, would not have thought it possible for a friendship
to exist between those that are mentally handicapped and those that are
not. Yet Vanier believes that friendship is what L'Arche is
about. That he does so is not only a challenge to Aristotle's
understanding of friendship, but to the presupposition of liberal
political theory and practice which tries to envision a politics in
which friendship is an afterthought.
That is why I am bold to suggest that the gentle character of the practices that constitute the work of L'Arche
are not peculiar to that work, but rather necessary for any polity that
would be good. For gentleness is a virtue that depends on, as Hans Reinders observes, that we learn to see:
the other person is "given" to us in the sense that, prior to rules
and principles of social morality, the presence of the other in our
lives constitutes our responsibility. Moral responsibility arises
neither from contractual relationships nor from the cooperative exchange
between independent individuals. Instead it arises from the nature of
the moral self that discovers itself within a network of social
relationships ...The benefits bestowed by love and friendship are
consequential rather than conditional, which explains why human life
that is constituted by these relationships is appropriately experienced
as a gift. A society that accepts responsibility for dependent others
such as the mentally disabled will do so because there are sufficient
people who accept something like this account as true.
These are not small matters. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, in their book Cultural Location of Disability,
advocate a cultural model of disability in the hope that "to theorise a
political act of renaming that designates disability as a site of
resistance and a source of cultural agency previously suppressed ― at
least to the extent that groups can successfully rewrite their own
definition in view of a damaging material and linguistic heritage." Such
resistance is necessary because, they argue, the very designation of
disability in modernity represented a scourge and a promise: "its very
presence signalled a debauched present of cultural degeneration that was
tending to regress toward a prior state of primitivism, while at the
same time it seemed to promise that its absence would mark the
completion of modernity as a cultural project."
But I confess I am
not convinced that a cultural studies model of disability will provide
the resistance they so desire. Rather I think Jean Vanier has given us
through the witness of L'Arche the kind of gift we need to help
us overwhelm the wound of loneliness that grips our lives in the name
of freedom. Such a gift Vanier rightly thinks to be political. For without examples like L'Arche we will assume there is no alternative to the politics of distrust that derives from the wound of our loneliness.
For
I fear many of us, like Daniel, feel guilty for existing and as a
result seek to protect ourselves with walls thickened by our refusal to
acknowledge our vulnerability. Vanier exemplifies a way to be with one
another, to overcome our walls of protection, we could not "think up."
We do well, therefore, to attend to the lessons of L'Arche on how to be, even in the most difficult relationships, gentle.
God and gentleness
To
try to suggest the political significance of gentleness seems quite
enough a task for any paper, but I cannot conclude without exploring
what may be an even greater challenge. Put simply: I wonder if the kind
of gentleness constitutive of L'Arche is possible without God.
Vanier's written work is suffused with his unmistakable Catholic
convictions and piety. Indeed, in many of the quotations from his work
already cited, he makes clear that without Jesus and the Holy Spirit the
work of L'Arche would be impossible.
Yet in Made for Happiness,
Vanier observes that many people today have no religious faith yet it
remains important for us to be able to communicate with them at a
rational level in order to reflect upon things human. He rightly says
that many of Aristotle's insights are valid for any ethics. For, according to Vanier, being human does not consist in obeying laws, but rather to be human:
means becoming as perfectly accomplished as possible. If we do not
become fully accomplished, something is lost to the whole of humanity.
For Aristotle this accomplishment derives from the exercise of the most
perfect activity: that of seeking the truth in all things, shunning lies
and illusions, acting in accordance with justice, transcending oneself
to act for the good of others in society.
I have no reason to question Vanier's use of Aristotle
as a way to sustain a conversation with those that do no share his
Christian convictions. Indeed, with Charles Pinches
I have explored some of the same resources that Aristotle provides for
helping Christians understand what it means to be Christian. With
Vanier, I believe we were created for happiness which turns out, as
Aquinas suggests, to be nothing less than to be befriended by God. But
to be befriended by God is surely to require a transformation of self
not unlike learning to be gentled into being by being
befriended by a person as unlike me as the mentally disabled.
Accordingly, Aristotle can help us make connections with those that do
not share our faith, but it remains the case that what we believe as
Christians may finally "explode" Aristotle's categories.
Which
means, I think, that if gentleness is a virtue constitutive of politics,
then Christians cannot help but be in tension with the liberal
political arrangements. For one of the reasons Nussbaum finds a Rawlsian
account attractive in spite of the exclusion of the disabled is that such an account:
is articulated in terms of free-standing ethical ideas only, without
reliance on metaphysical and epistemological doctrines (such as those of
the soul, or revelation, or the denial of either of these) that would
divide citizens along lines of religion or comprehensive ethical
doctrine. It is therefore hoped that this conception can be the object
of an overlapping consensus among citizens who otherwise have different
comprehensive views.
Which makes it all the more important that L'Arche not hide its lamp under a bushel basket. If L'Arche loses its theological voice I think it will not only be a loss for L'Arche, but for any politics, and in particular those determined by liberal political arrangements, in which L'Arche exists.
All I am asking is for Vanier to be willing to wash the feet of those who do not share his faith. In his commentary on the Gospel of John,
Vanier reflects on the problem of power by commenting on Jesus's
washing of the feet of his disciples (John 13:1-17). He notes that all
societies are built on the model of a pyramid with they powerful, the
rich, and the intelligent at the top. Yet Jesus takes the place of the
slave by washing his disciples' feet. Vanier confesses that he is deeply
moved when someone with disabilities washes his feet. That someone with
disabilities should wash the feet of Vanier is why the politics of the
gospel is, as Vanier puts it, of a "world upside down."
Vanier
observes that it is tempting for those that would wash the feet of the
disabled to assume the model of the pyramid of power in the name of the
service they perform. For example, he suggests after the conversion of
Constantine in 313, church and state became intertwined with the result
that many bishops and abbots acted as if they were princes and lords.
The dominant habits of the society became the habits of the church
corrupting the church. Yet Francis of Assisi came refusing to attack the
institution of the church, which included many good people, but choose
the other way by his commitment to the poor. Reflecting on Francis's Admonitions to the heads of his fraternities, Vanier notes:
Followers of Jesus will continually be caught up in the paradox.
Shepherds, teachers and leaders are necessary. They have power, but how
should they exercise that power in the spirit of the gospels? How should
they give a clear message about the truth of Jesus's message? How
should they speak out against the powers of wealth? How should they be
servant-leaders who humbly give their lives?
Vanier answers: "When the poor and weak are present,
they prevent us from falling into the trap of power ― even the power to
do good ― of thinking that it is we who are the good ones, who must save
the Saviour and is church." Which means the politics of gentleness
cannot be a triumphalistic politics, but that is why it is all the more
important that the theological voice of L'Arche not be silenced.
It
is not for us as Christians to regret the loss of Christendom, but it
means it is all the more important that the care, the gentle care
exemplified by Jesus in washing his disciples' feet, that gentleness
exemplified in L'Arche, be unapologetically a witness to the
One who would save us through the cross. Otherwise how would the world
know, the world as described by John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, that our
loneliness has been overwhelmed.
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