(There is complexity in human development. Piaget notices that most children develop the ability to “grasp the consequences of their actions” when they move from concrete operations in middle school to abstract reasoning in high school.
Psychologically we develop various capacities for inquiry, understanding and making judgments,, but at every moment one is liable to ignore or suppress the evidence that is clearly there, and the capacity remains unfulfilled.
We can also develop the ability for self reflection. We can develop the capacity to become self aware. We can learn to catch ourselves ignoring the evidence at hand, and then intentionally begin to wonder and question in a way that seeks all relevant data. Being self aware of our biases allows one to make true and accurate judgments.
For lonergan, history runs in three different cycles. First progress, progress takes place when a community follows the basic Imperatives 1) Be Aware, Be Intelligent, Be Reasonable, Be Responsible and Be motivated by Love. These are called Transcendental levels of Consciousness.
Decline however, is “ a negative, cumulative process caused by sinful biases. These biases have harmful consequences throughout a vicious cycle….(see the essay on Biases on this site)
The scheme of biases, oversight, unintelligent policies, and inept actions lead to absurd situations. recurs again and again, getting worse each time. And so biases deepen, oversights abound, policies become increasingly unintelligible, actions become more and more inept, and situations extend ever more brutally the bounds of the absurd.1)
The Quest for God and The Good Life by Mark T Miller Chapter 7 Page 130
Excerpt from Patrick Byrne’s paper Ecology, Economy, and Redemption as Dynamic: The contributions of Jane Jacobs and Bernard Lonergan http://www3.nd.edu/~ecoltheo/text_byrne.htm
(5) Bias and Destruction . . . Unlike natural ecologies, innovations in human social and economic arrangements are all too frequently implemented without the fullness of intelligent self-correction. Real self-correction can occur only when the full complement of further pertinent questions and problems are taken into account and answered with creative solutions. The possibilities of genuine social and economic self-correction are cut short, Lonergan argues, by the forces of what he terms "bias." He therefore resonates with Jane Jacobs complaint, "we no longer care" to understand "how things really do work, but only what kind of quick easy outer impression they give" (1993, 11). When biases interfere with the full development of intelligence, both the well-functioning of human systems as well as their underlying natural infrastructure is imperiled.
Lonergan’s account of emergent probability in the human order incorporates the fact of human failure to consider questions raised by their endeavors, failures to seek answers even to all the questions they do raise, and refusals to act according to what they come to understand as the best courses of action. He identifies four fundamental forms of bias that distort human collaborative efforts into dysfunctional constellations: psychological aberrations ("dramatic bias"), selfishness disregard ("individual bias"), ethnic, racial, class and gender discrimination ("group bias"), and the narrow-minded disregard for non-immediate consequences, such as long-term environmental impacts ("general bias"). Instances of bias are legion. They all operate by ignoring the reflective processes of asking and answering all the questions that are raised by complex situations. According to Lonergan, biased courses of action that evade intelligent self-correction initiate downward spirals of decline, degradation and destruction not only of natural but also of cultural environments. Biases and decline have their own "logic" – the logic of a vicious cycles that lead to great destruction, unless something acts to reverse their downward trends (1992, 214-23, 242-63).
(6) Grace and Redemption
In using the term "bias" Lonergan characterizes the accumulating devastation in terms of its relation of opposition to the self-correcting potential of intelligence, inquiry, and insight. But as a Christian theologian, Lonergan was clear that the same pattern of decline is a pattern of sin in its relation of opposition to God. Lonergan is in fundamental agreement with St. Augustine’s characterization: "evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains." And as a Christian theologian, he affirmed that the reversal of sin and its devastating social consequences is by God’s grace. In fact his earliest research was on the development of Aquinas’s theory of grace (2000).
What is distinctive in Lonergan’s own treatment of grace and redemption is his way of situating them in relation to emergent probability. In Insight, he raises the question of God’s solution to the problem of sin, evil, and social decline, and argues that the solution is the emergence of the theological virtues of "faith, hope and love" (1992, 718-25, 741). There he reflects upon redemption as occurring within this universe of emergent probability — "When in the fullness of time" the Redeemer came, as Christian theology has put it.
Soon after Insight, however, Lonergan began to speak about the relationship between emergent world process and redemption more broadly as involving "three dynamics" of creativity and progress (intelligent self-correction), decline and degradation (bias and sin), and redemption and recovery through the healing that takes place in all religious love (1993, 1999a). The religious love, according to Lonergan’s later view, is a constant of human affairs. Love heals hatred and bias, and off-sets the corrosive effects of stupidity and wickedness. There is a strain of hatred of nature to be found embedded in the seminal works of some founders of modernity like Machiavelli and Bacon. There is also misanthropic hatred to be found in certain strains of environmental activism. Religious love is love of God, and to love God unconditionally is to love everything God loves–all natural and human creation. Grace, religious love, sets about undoing hatred and making possible healing and discerning, intelligent responses to situations.
As a Christian theologian Lonergan identifies the unconditional love found in all religions with the mission of the Holy Spirit, "God’s love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom 5, 5)" (1972, 105). This dynamic of redemption, Lonergan claims, suffuses all human history and is present through all human affairs, just as is intelligent creativity and biased degradation. The mission of the Holy Spirit reaches full efficacy through the mission of the Son, who inaugurates in emergent probability God-authored schemes testifying to God’s undying redemptive love.
(The following comes from several sources that I have misplaced;-(
First, there is what Lonergan calls the "dramatic bias." Dramatic bias operates at the level of elementary feelings and passions. Dramatic bias affects a person’s outlook, it is shaped by their neurosis. Because of this, dramatic bias generates an unconscious, but truncated worldview. There are things that cannot, and will not be seen.
“Individual bias” entails a loss of sympathy with others so one looks only to self interest in work and family and so does not share or seek the common good. It manifests itself in egoism. Egoism sabotages intellectual operations in order to serve the self-interest of the egoist. The egoist deliberately, but often unconsciously, or at least not responsibly, arranges events in order to satisfy his or her desires. At its most extreme, individual bias is manifested in the criminal and in crime's deteriorating effect on society. At a less extreme level, individual bias leads to a kind of dis-ease in the individual, causing alienation.
Group bias is individual bias writ large. It is self-interest at the level of a particular group. Because the criteria for satisfaction has shifted from the individual to the group, it is easy to be deluded into thinking the bias is for a seemingly "good" order.
"Group bias operates in the very genesis of common-sense views." Although intelligence thrives on continuous progress, the sensibility is embedded in a particular social order. Change is not easy and development at the level of a group is possible to the degree a group can intelligently respond to situations as they occur. Self preservation, however, precipitates blind spots as a group struggles to maintain its usefulness and its advantage. Intelligence, therefore, is compromised as it is forced to take a secondary position to the group interest. If the strong group, the group with advantage and power, those who have managed to use progress and social development for their own interests, are able to use the insights of operative ideas to there own advantage, there are always those who are unable to do this and so "fall behind in the process of social development." The oppressive injustice that emerges from group bias creates within its very orientation or operation a self-corrective. Ultimately distortions created by group bias surface in such an obvious manner that the group is destined for defeat. Thus, the nature of group bias creates its own ultimate reversal. For, not only is the group's bias revealed by the surfacing of neglected ideas, the revelation is accompanied by the power to realize those ideas. This is why Lonergan calls group bias the shorter cycle of decline: built into its very distortion is its self-corrective reversal.
General bias is a deeper, more pervasive bias the corrective or reversal of which, unlike group bias, is in no way guaranteed. What Lonergan calls the "general bias of common sense," (Insight 226) because of its pervasiveness, depth and insidiousness, general bias generates the longer cycle of decline. For Lonergan, the particular danger of common sense, and hence its general bias, is in its extending "its legitimate concern for the concrete and the immediately practical INTO disregard of larger issues and indifference to long-term results." (I 226)
Humanity turns to common sense to deliver it from individual and group bias which are motivated by self-interest, however, common sense is unable to rise above this general bias. Consequently, for Lonergan, common sense must be led, at a deeper level, by a human science. General bias prevents common sense from acknowledging and embracing ideas which consider the longer view or a higher viewpoint. This incapacity on the part of common sense is not only a lack of ability, it is also a refusal. The general bias of common sense cumulatively deteriorates the social situation.
The possibility of a detached and disinterested intelligence becomes more remote as it shifts from mere irrelevance to complete surrender. The ramifications of this shift are disastrous for society; no longer is there a way to distinguish between what is social achievement and what is social surd, (I 230-1) no longer is there a possibility of a criterion of truth or a possibility of authority, in short, human intelligence has become radically uncritical. Existence is ravaged by a shifting that has no parameters and no points of reference. What is judged as progress is based on parameters that become completely turned around a generation (or less) later. Unless theory is related to practice, unless it takes its data from the empirical reality of humanity and not from separate, independent norms, it is deemed by the general bias of common sense as useless.
For Lonergan, the only hope for reversal of the longer cycle of decline stems from his notion of emergent probability.
What drives decline. . . . Lonergan proposed that such oversights might be rooted in any of four biases endemic to consciousness: (1) Neurosis resists insight into one’s psyche. (2) Egoism resists insight into what benefits others. (3) Loyalism resists insights into the good of other groups. (4) Anti-intellectualism resists insights that require any thorough investigation, theory-based analyses, long-range planning, and broad implementation. In each type, one’s intelligence is selectively suppressed and one’s self-image is supported by positive affects that reinforce the bias and by negative affects toward threats to the bias.
What drives recovery. [A]n analysis of love… show how it functions to reverse the dynamics of decline.
Love liberates the subject to see values: Some values result not from logical analyses of pros and cons but rather from being in love. Love impels friends of the neurotic and egoist to draw them out of their self-concern, freeing their intelligence to consider the value of more objective solutions. Love of humanity frees loyalists to regard other groups with the same intelligence, reason and responsibility as they do their own. Love of humanity frees the celebrated person of common sense to appreciate the more comprehensive viewpoints of critical history, science, philosophy and theology. Love of a transcendent, unreservedly loving God frees a person from blinding hatred, greed and power mongering, liberating him or her to a divinely shared commitment to what is unreservedly intelligible, reasonable, responsible and loving.
Love brings hope: There is a power in the human drama by which we cling to some values no matter how often our efforts are frustrated. Our hopes may be dashed, but we still hope. This hope is a desire rendered confident by love. Those who are committed to self-transcendence trust their love to strengthen their resolve, not only to act against the radical unintelligibility of basic sin, but also to yield their personal advantage for the sake of the common good. Such love-based hope works directly against biased positive self-images as well as negative images of fate that give despair the last word. To feel confident about the order we hope for, we do not look to theories or logic. We rely on the symbols that link our imagination and affectivity. These inner symbols are secured through the external media of aesthetics, ritual, and liturgy.
Love opposes revenge: There is an impulse in us to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. While any adolescent can see that this strategy cannot be the foundation of a civil society, it is difficult to withhold vengeance on those who harm us. It is the nature of love, however, to resist hurting others and to transcend vengeance. It is because of such transcendent love that we move beyond revenge to forgiveness and beyond forgiveness to collaboration.