The healing minority
This past weekend I presented a paper entitled “The Healing Minority: Bernard Lonergan’s practical goal of healing and creating in history” at the West Coast Methods Institute at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington. My subject was the work of Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan, who invoked the work of historian Arnold Toynbee, and paid particular attention to the latter’s notion of a “creative minority” that evokes historic change in the world. In his essay “Healing and Creating in History,” Lonergan notes that a creative minority, and the creative process that their insights yield, lead to social progress.
Conversely, Lonergan attends to the problems of the “social surd,” the unintelligible patterns that arise from human bias and sin, as well as the shorter and longer cycles of social decline due to myopic and naive appeals to immediate practical solutions. Insights dry up; the creative minority becomes, following Toynbee, “merely the dominant minority.” Social decline follows.
In the paper, I explore the notion of a “healing minority,” a group whose function is to reverse the effects of social decline and promote social progress. The notion of a healing minority is not named per se in Lonergan’s writings, but is implicit in two ways. First, in his descriptions of the prerequisites for social progress, he identifies groups that understand the inevitability of the social surd and nevertheless commit themselves to social progress by embracing what he calls a “dialectical attitude of the will,” committing themselves to overcoming evil with good. (Lonergan is particularly influenced by St. Paul’s appeal in Romans 12:21). Second, he invokes those groups whose explicit mission is to promote the goods of community life.
Lonergan’s biographer Frederick Crowe writes,
It was in the early 1940s that [Lonergan] read the first six volumes of Toynbee…it is quite possible, then, and even likely that to some extent he saw his own life in Toynbean terms, and realized…that there was an enormous work to be done, and done in withdrawal, before he could return and make his own specific contribution to the question of Christ in history. What specifically would that enormous work involve? It would include the construction of his great two-volume organon: Insight and Method.
Christ and History: The Christology of Bernard Lonergan from 1935 to 1982 (Ottawa: Novalis Press, 2005), 37.
Similarly, Robert Doran writes about Lonergan’s massive book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,
What he most wanted to say, then, included preeminently a position on the role of human intelligence in history and society, and on the relation of intelligence to social and cultural progress and decline, especially in view of the distinct dangers confronting human society today.”
Robert “Doran, “Introduction — Lonergan: An Appreciation,” in Vernon Gregson, The Desires of the Human Heart : an Introduction to the Theology of Bernard Lonergan (Paulist Press, 1988), 8.
I trace Lonergan’s thought from some of his earliest work (a paper he first wrote as a student, “Pantôn Anakephalaiôsis,” through Insight, into his later work Method in Theology and the essay “Healing and Creating in History.” I show how Toynbee’s notion of a creative minority, as seen below in Insight, must be complemented by a notion of a healing minority.
Opinions and attitudes that once were the oddity of a minority gradually spread through society to become the platitudes of politicians and journalists, the assumptions of legislators and educators, the uncontroverted nucleus of the common sense of a people. Eventually, they too become antiquated; they are regarded as the obstinacy of an old guard that will not learn; their influence is restricted to backwaters immune to the renewing force of the main current of human thought and feeling. (262)
The healing minority is capable of standing amidst the evil of the world and being willing to do good in the face of it.
Where hatred only sees evil, love reveals values. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out, no matter what the sacrifice involved. Where hatred reinforces bias, love dissolves it, whether it be the bias of unconscious motivation, the bias of individual or group egoism, or the bias of omnicompetent, shortsighted common sense. Where hatred plods around in ever narrower vicious circles, love breaks the bonds of psychological and social determinisms with the conviction of faith and the power of hope. (“Healing and Creating in History,” 101)
If there is a creative minority, there is also then a healing minority. For even with the inevitability of sin and its historical manifestation as decline, that vector has not had and will not have the last word. What is clear from any historical analysis is that progress and decline overlap; both vectors are always present. The mistake of any utopian vision — Marxist, Nietzschean, or even a naïve theological approximation — is to posit a single vector of progress to be promoted by the elimination of its opponents. That mistake was the great flight from understanding that characterized so many of the atrocities of the twentieth century, from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge.
What Lonergan points to is the need for a healing minority to respond to evil with good.
There are needed, then, individuals and groups and, in the modern world, organizations that labor to persuade people to intellectual, moral, and religious conversion and that work systematically to undo the mischief brought about by alienation and ideology. (Method, 333)
In short, the work of the healing minority is to build community, without which “human society and sovereign states cannot function” (Method, 333). For only in community built from below upwards is the possiblity of creating from above downwards possible. The task of community building is fundamentally a task of building common meaning, of modeling the various forms of conversion (psychic, intellectual, moral, religious) for the purpose of deepened intersubjectivity — or, in more commonsense language, care for one another.
For a working model of this kind of healing minority, see Mack McCarter with Tim Muldoon, How to Rebuild the World Neighborhood by Neighborhood (Orbis Books, 2022).
I’ll publish the full essay in a journal in the coming months. Note: all citations of Lonergan are from the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (University of Toronto Press).
