There is an even broader claim that can be made about my thesis that social movements have three generic types, the Manichaen, the Donatist and the Arian, those terms adopted from three major Christian heresies. Christianity doesn’t just provide names for and historical examples of the three strands inherent in any social movement. It is that a social movement is not a formal idea, something inherent in the nature of social behavior. Rather, a social movement is an historical invention, and it was invented only once, by Christianity, because of some inherent feature of Christianity, which is that it can generate, out of its own religious and intellectual resources, these three kinds of heresies or specialized understandings of the overall doctrine and experience of the religion.
The idea of a social movement was indeed prefigured in the “Genesis” story of Joseph and in “Exodus”. There are such things as social movements because human organizations can undertake to alter something very basic about the human condition, something that seems inevitable, just part of the way things are. Joseph was simply out to organize the nation so that it could alleviate the problems of the seasons, that some years offered good crops and some years yielded bad crops. In this way, society would triumph over nature and so make the nation less subject to starvation, a truly radical idea at the time. Joseph was able to do so by constructing silos and supervising the distribution of their contents when famine did arrive. The idea in “Exodus” is even more contrary to nature; it is that people are not in their natural condition when they are in servitude. People can alter that condition by declaring themselves a separate nation and emigrating, so long as they mobilize the political power to allow that to happen. The Declaration of Independence is not far behind.
The idea of a social movement becomes fully adumbrated in Christianity. The “motor” of a social movement is its triple paradox. That can sustain a social movement for a very long time, depending on how profound that paradox is. The history of Christianity is full of backing and filling in that movements within it embrace one or another of the three strands, Manichaeism, Donatism or Arianism, groups trying to restore what they think of as the essential message of Christianity, which is that of a salvation that lifts people from the ordinary world to the supernal one, however differently that idea of salvation is perceived.. Christianity will have played itself out when none of the three strands any longer grips the human imagination or when it has for too long restricted itself to only one or another of the three strands and so becomes ordinary life rather than a lever on ordinary life. A Church that restricts itself to a priesthood beholden only to their self-selected superiors, as happens in Manichaeism, makes itself insular and purely ritualistic, while perhaps not even a Donatist movement that sharply distinguishes between deserving and undeserving priests may wake it from its lethargy, and so all that would be left is the sort of Arian feel good religion that has characterized much of modern religion.
This thesis that all social movements are examples of the dynamics of the triple paradox of Christianity is the Weber thesis about the rise of the modern world taken to its logical conclusion. Because of Christianity, the Western World sped up way ahead of the rest of the world and the rest of the world caught up by becoming influenced by Christian nations and, most particularly, Protestant nations, like Great Britain and the United States. That insight puts various social movements in perspective. A movement can accomplish the liberation of a particular ethnic group, or can accomplish a liberation of a very different sort, one that is spiritual more than it is nationalistic, because it transforms the entire social order, nationalistic liberation becoming only a metaphor for that deeper kind of liberation. Understood this way, social movements are cumulative in that they build on one another’s successes, so that it takes generations of a gradually extended franchise to reach universal suffrage, or whatever is considered universal at the point which has been reached, and that it takes hundreds of years to accomplish a revolution towards democracy that refines the concept so that it is workable: the idea of a parliament based democracy replacing the idea of a direct democracy, and the idea of a parliament based democracy refined so that it meets regularly and that it comes to control foreign policy as well as domestic policy, and that the franchise is extended so that it is worth calling a democracy, and something like a bill of rights is put in place to ensure that elections are conducted fairly because, after all, one cannot have a fair election if there is no right of free speech or assembly or if people can be thrown into jail without the right of habeas corpus.
Other civilizations than the Western European one simply do not elaborate a set of social movements. Rather, what they have are peasant risings, dynastic changes, and other displacements brought on by external or natural seeming forces—“the mandate of heaven”—rather than as the result of human planning for the purpose of upending the society. Manchurians have always invaded China, and sometimes they are successful, and sometimes they are not. Similarly, Spartacus was not rebelling against the Roman state so as to alter Roman society. He just wanted to get his people off of the Italian peninsula, just as the Hebrews just wanted to get out of Egypt, not reform it. Constructive history does not take place in China until the Boxer Rebellion which, in its naïve and shocking way, aped Western social movements. Sun Yat Sen and so many other Chinese revolutionaries were emulators of the American Founding Fathers or of Soviet Marxism. Chinese social movements were therefore not home grown. Neither are Islamic social movements, which still do not seem to have learned the lesson that a revolution is supposed to replace something that exists with something different, rather than exist just as a turmoil that results in the replacement of one despotic regime with another. The people in Cairo during the Arab Spring adopted the vocabulary of the West but not the substance of what it means to carry on a revolution, which would not be to trust the army to oust itself and install a democracy. The supposed Westerners just created martyrs to fortune, and Egypt went back to the rule of the military and the religionists.
Marxism also has three heresies. Marxism gives rise to the Manichaeism of Soviet Marxism, where there is a war between values as they were once understood and as they are understood under the new dispensation, so that whatever is done in the name of Marxism can no longer be justified or seen as an extension of or in dialogue with the old bourgeois concerns of political freedom and material prosperity that gave rise to Marxism in the first place. There is no way, under this understanding, for mere mortals to communicate with the movement of history. They have no way to judge it; they can only give way before it. Only the party can chart the course towards the eventual world revolution through the twin shoals of the perfidy of the capitalists and the delusions of the masses, and how they decide to do so is not for the masses they lead to judge, even if it means turning on a dime and supporting Hitler after having opposed him.
Marxist Revisionists such as Karl Kautsky and Karl Bernstein are Arians because they think that normal political processes can lead people from a capitalist system that does not spread its wealth to the masses to one that does. Marxist Revisionism is barely distinguishable from the idea of Social Democrats that bourgeois government structures can serve as the basis for changing society. All you have to do to change capitalism is to win an election. But if that is the case, then Marxism need not have the unyielding nature of the class struggle as its central problem. There is no unyielding class struggle, only interest groups politics.
New Left Cultural Marxists are Donatists because they anoint one or another of those who suffer under capitalism-- women, blacks, young people, and peasants in some third world country-- as the group selected by history to liberate all groups from their particular histories. That is contrary to the essential Marxist view, which is the one where the central paradox has not be refined out of its difficulties, that only the working class can speak for progress, and that a good analysis of the political situation is perfectly objective rather than a matter of the point of view of those “saved” by their oppression to know the truth.
Any ideology or religion or general view of the world complex enough to sustain itself for any length of time as a movement to change the world or just its own society will be subject to these three heresies. Any point of view distinguishes itself from the world that is its subject, the world as it seems, and so there is a question of how to relate the world as it is to the world as it seems. If that relationship is so close that there is no significant difference between the elite or esoteric or refined point of view and the mass, common or naive point of view, then the doctrine has fallen into the Arian heresy; if that relationship is so remote that there seems little chance or ability for the world as it is to affect the world that really is, or visa versa, then the doctrine has fallen into the Manicheean heresy; and if the relationship is unstable, so that it is difficult to decide if one is hearing the revealed or true voice, then the doctrine has fallen into the Donatist heresy.
Contemporary education, for example, is trisected between Arian Deweyites who think that learning is the result of hand on projects, and so is not so different from the way people learn outside of school, Manicheans who espouse rigorous standards because there is such a rift between students who do not want to learn and teachers impatient to teach them; and Donatists, like the multiculturalists, who think that they can create within their own school the psychological fabric that will allow children to learn, even if that fabric is different from the one created by other ethnic groups in schools that cater to other ethnic groups. Schools for Chinese American kids will be different from schools for Hispanic kids, there being no common metric to compare the rates of success of the various schools, even though the supposition is that children educated in ethnically segregated schools will be able to meet the same standards as will the children of other ethnic groups.
The Women’s Movement is a good example of what happens in the course of a movement: its paradoxes persist so long as the movement is on the rise and having some success. The Manichean version of the women’s movement is that there is an unbridgeable difference between men and women. You are always sleeping with the enemy, and the only way to deal with them is to build a fence around them or otherwise restrict them. Why not? Women are more intelligent than men. They are also more moral because, as Carol Gilligan argued, they take a lot more into account in making moral judgments than do men, who simply follow abstract moral principles. There are possible biological inventions that might make men unnecessary for reproduction. So let them die off, or at least restrict yourself to a circle of women so that you don’t have to engage in heterosexual relationships, which is a form of sexuality that is often the equivalent of rape. Pornography is a weapon of male exploitation. Not everybody was as radical as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were, but women of all ages and classes are prone to muse that it is difficult to escape the conclusion that men are always insensitive and difficult, even if you want to put up with them.
The Donatist view in the women’s movement was that most men were alright, though a lot weren’t, and so it was necessary to supply laws that protected women from abusive and socially insensitive men who sometimes went over the line in invading the personal space of women and, in general, treating them with contempt. The #Metoo Movement gave voice to this point of view, though this view has been around for a while. I had a colleague who seriously considered it her job to see whether her colleagues were being inappropriate when they tapped women students on the shoulder as a sign of affection. She once asked me in a good humored way whether I also touched male students in that way, and when I said I did, she smiled and felt justified in including me in the list of good men. This was the time in the Eighties when there was a code of conduct at Oberlin whereby male students were required to get specific permission before making the next move on their dates. This was at the same time that, during sexual awareness meetings conducted for faculty by lawyers, male faculty members were counseled not to kiss the cheeks of the wives of colleagues lest it be misunderstood.
The Arian view of the women’s movement is that there are no essential differences between men and women and that the purpose of the law was simply to compensate for the obvious biological differences between the sexes. Women needed pregnancy leaves as well as access to birth control and abortions so that they could compete with men in the workplace, which they could do very well if they had these minor accommodations. And that, by and by, came to pass. Moreover, the physical differences between men and women that supposedly prevented women doing jobs previously held exclusively by men could be for the most part overcome by training. Women could be police officers, even if the physical test for entrance to the police department was easier for women than for men because women made up for lack of strength by being better at domestic conflict resolution than were male officers. Women can serve in the military in that pure strength is far less important than grit and determination and the ability to abide discomfort. Where physical strength does make a difference, which is the case in fire departments and sanitation departments and in many construction jobs, women would just cease to apply.
The Manichean model for women’s liberation died of its own weight and because of the lack of a practicable social program that would go along with those views. The Donatist model of separating the good guys from the bad guys seems caught up in its own contradictions because it has not way to le accused men off the hook, once they are charged, although that sets up cognitive dissonance for women who support Joe Biden, and so may lead Metooers to have to adapt their views so as to include some sort of due process for accused males. The Arian model came to prevail and so the women’s movement has largely achieved its goals, even without an equal rights amendment. There are few glass ceilings left, even if the percentage of women in each of the two houses of Congress is still far from fifty percent.
It is not clear whether one of the three rationalized strands of a social movement always dominates. Arianism seems most likely to prevail within the women's movement as it did in the Civil Rights Movement, where Martin Luther King, Jr’s idea of accommodating blacks and whites to one another did better than Malcolm X’s Manichean desire to separate the races or the idea of having every group come to its own terms with overall society, as if that proved very fruitful for Native Americans, who have casinos but also have many people huddled up on poverty stricken reservations. Marcus Garvey was taken with the idea of building a self-sufficient black community within white society, but that didn’t pan out. It is also unclear whether it is the unrationalized paradox that generates the social movement because the unresolved paradox has a short half life. Marx’s complex theory of the interdependence between economic circumstances and consciousness gives way to Revisionist Marxism, socialism in one country, which is a Donatist notion, and the Manichean Soviet Marxism which provided a frisson of fear and inevitability and so was a proper model for Orwell’s depiction of totalitarianism. It has the same attractiveness as the version of Christianity whereby a novice priest gives up all pretense of having free will only to be assigned by his superiors to do what he had been inclined to do in his previous life, which is what happened to Thomas Merton. But Soviet Marxism came to an end while the supposed superficiality of Revisionist Marxism still elects European governments. And it does seem the case, as I have said, that the Women’s Movement was both successful and most meaningful in its Arian version.
Arianism, however, is not the royal road of social movements. Abolitionism, which was certainly Manichean in that it was uncompromising in its opposition to slavery, and which gave rise to Radical Reconstruction, proved the wisest of the movements before the American Civil War. The Arianism of allowing the post-War South to “naturally” develop into an industrialized sector of the nation and so gradually integrate into the nation just didn’t happen, just as Douglas’ Donatism, which would allow each state to chart its own way, was outvoted in 1860 and made out of date by the War. It took a Second Reconstruction, one which was again dependant on Northern support, to put an end to racial segregation. And sustaining an enduring paradox may have worked with religious groups, such as American Jews, who want to be within America and yet know themselves as apart from it, which is a consciousness supposedly gifted on all Christians, who are both of this world and of another, but it does not work for gays and lesbians who do not want to be both in the mainstream world and outside of it in that they want to be accepted as couples like any other. There is much still to be explored about the triple strands of social movements.