Shared Mission

Fifty years since Vatican II (1962-65), it is timely, first, to deepen understanding of the shared mission of all the Lord’s disciples, both the majority (lay) faithful and the minority (religious and clerical) faithful; second, to improve their co-responsibility and co-operation; third, to empower the laity especially through theological and professional formation.

In chapter 2, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church or Lumen Gentium (LG) affirms that there is basically one vocation and one mission for all the disciples, whether lay, consecrated, or ordained. 
 
By virtue of the sacrament of baptism, every disciple has both the right and responsibility to exercise the threefold ministry of prophet (proclaimer), priest (sanctifier) and king (policy-maker) within the Church and wider society.  Thus, the laity “in their own way share the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ and to the best of their ability carry on the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world” (LG 31). 
 
“Each of the faithful [has] the right and duty of exercising charisms in the Church and in the world for the good of humanity and the development of the Church, of exercising them in the freedom of the Holy Spirit who ‘breathes where It wills’ (John 3:8), and at the same time in communion with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ, and with one’s pastors especially” (Apostolate of the Laity 3).
 
“The lay faithful are not second class members [of the Church].  They share with all the baptized an equal Christian dignity.” (Second Plenary Council of the Philippines [PCP II], 405)  It is not their primary mission to be junior partners or participants in the apostolate of the minority faithful, the ordained and the consecrated members.
 
Co-responsibility among the majority and minority faithful are necessary for the work of integral evangelization in which the whole Gospel is offered to whole persons with their religious, cultural, political and economic aspects.  Both the clergy and the religious worldwide cannot offer enough energy and expertise to evangelize all the vast fields of economics, politics, and cultures.
 
The whole Church needs competent and committed laity (and even competent and benevolent non-believers) to engage with the world:

“Nowadays when things change so rapidly and thought patterns differ so widely, the Church needs to step up this exchange [with different cultures] by calling upon the help of people who are living in the world, who are expert in its organizations and its forms of training, and who understand its mentality, in the case of believers and nonbelievers alike” (Church in the Modern World 44).

 
Engagement with the world is what the laity do in their day-to-day lives.  Thus, the laity have a “secular character,” as “they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life” (LG 31). 
 
The laity are secular, not because their activities are outside of or in opposition to the action of the Holy Spirit.  “The secular character of the laity does not make them ‘worldly’ or keep them from the sacred activities of the mission of the Church” (Aurelie Hagstrom).  They are secular because much of their day-to-day practices and affairs are outside of the control or administration of the hierarchy. 
 
More importantly, the laity are secular because they are “immediately and most numerously seen as the presence of the Church in the world” (PCP II, 423), and they are called to “contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven” (LG 31), especially in multireligious, multicultural, or pluralistic contexts.  In such contexts, the explicit proclamation of the faith has to be done wisely and during opportune times so that faith expressions would not be like “pearls (thrown) to pigs” (Matthew 7:6) which might provoke unnecessary scorn or violence.
 
Integral evangelization entails the active participation and co-leadership of lay persons, as their “field of evangelizing activity is the vast and complicated world of politics, economics…the world of culture, the sciences and the arts, international life and the mass media.  It also includes… human love, the family, the education of children and adolescents, professional work and suffering.” (Evangelization in the Modern World 70)

The active participation of the majority faithful becomes more urgent owing to these signs of the times: the ageing of the clergy and their steadily diminishing numbers in the older churches of Europe and North America, the globalization of information and, with increasing access of masses of people to means of interactive communication, increasing discontent with one-way communication, authoritarianism, and elitism globally.

Health and Vital Enigmas

In trying to improve the services of the public health system in the Philippines, leaders and conscientious citizens have to adopt or recognize an integral model of health and to avoid an uncritical adoption of the Western “biomedical model of health” which tends to forget or repress existential enigmas and thus to become a narrow and dehumanizing view of health.
According to Anthony Giddens:
“The biomedical model of health [builds on] the belief that disease can be defined in objective terms and that the sick body can be restored to health through scientifically based medical treatment.  The biomedical model of health emerged alongside modern societies.  It was linked to the rise of demographics – the study of the size, composition and dynamics of human populations – and the growing interest of states in promoting public health.” (Sociology, 4^th ed)

In the process of building the modern urban environment, sources of existential anxiety such as deterioration and death, chronic sickness, madness, and eroticism got sequestered from day-to-day routines (Modernity and Self-Identity).  These realities remind us that we are inseparable from nature, its rhythms, and its contingencies.
 

In the process of building the surveilled environments of hospitals, asylums, and carceral complexes, these realities became secluded from regular activities.  The face-to-face presencing of dying and death, the very smell of it, and the laughing and singing of the insane have become unusual phenomena to upper-class and middle-class persons especially in urban locales.

“In pre-modern societies chronic sickness was part of many people’s lives and contact with death was a more or less commonplace feature of everyone’s experience (Modernity and Self-Identity).  These critical yet familiar features of pre-modern life were often enveloped in traditional practices and rituals that offered meaning and solace.  Deep immersion in tradition helped people to appreciate the continuous intermingling of being and non-being in the world.

The Church needs to re-examine and to redesign or restructure creatively its liturgies and rituals in order to help contemporary people appreciate better the intermingling of being and non-being in society and nature.

Power and Agency

Among interacting agents, a disparity of discursive skills, or a disparity in knowledge about rules of formal discourse, can easily lead to a structuration of domination during those occasions and in those settings in which discourses are expected.  In most day-to-day contexts of interaction, a disparity of skills and resources among the agents exists, and thus more often than not, domination structures are reproduced.

For Anthony Giddens, what is more significant is the logical conjunction of the notion of human agency and that of power.  He writes:

“Action intrinsically involves the application of ‘means’ to achieve outcomes, brought about through the direct intervention of an actor in a course of events, ‘intended action’ being a sub-class of the actor’s doing or refraining from doing; power represents the capacity of the agent to mobilize resources to constitute those ‘means.’  In this most general sense, ‘power’ refers to the transformative capacity of human action.” (New Rules)

For Giddens, the understanding of power as domination is narrower than his general conception of power as transformative capacity.  Furthermore, in his view, “the relation between power and conflict is a contingent one.” He continues:

“If power and conflict frequently go together, it is not because the one logically implies the other, but because power is linked to the pursuance of interests, and people’s interests may fail to coincide…Power is a feature of every form of human interaction, division of interest is not.” (New Rules).

For Giddens, the reproduction of a domination structure during interaction does not necessarily imply that there exists a conflict of interests among the interacting agents.  There are contexts when the interests of a dominant person (or group) and a dependent person (or group) do coincide, and although such contexts are perhaps less common than not, they can be significant enough not only for sociological analysis but also for anticipating social changes.

For Giddens, “power relations are relations of autonomy and dependence, but even the most autonomous agent is in some degree dependent, and the most dependent actor or party in a relationship retains some autonomy” (Central Problems).  All forms of dependence make some resources available to subordinates for influencing the activities of their superiors.  Giddens calls this notion the dialectic of control in systems of interaction.

Giddens’ conception of the dialectic of control recognizes that power relations are not constant-sum games.  Social power is not a fixed quantity that gets divided between the interacting parties so much so that when one party becomes more powerful the other party becomes weaker correspondingly.

The dialectic of control is open to a wide range of possible effects: (1) both interacting parties become more powerful, though usually to different degrees; (2) one party becomes more powerful while the other becomes weaker; or (3) both parties becomes weaker.

Human Consciousness

According to Anthony Giddens, practical consciousness is “tacit knowledge that is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively” (Central Problems).  It is not the unconscious.

Giddens analytically distinguishes practical consciousness from discursive consciousness, but affirms that both converge in many moments of social interaction.  In the realm of discursive consciousness, “discursive capabilities do not just take the form of propositional statements: ‘discourse’ has to include modes of expression which are often treated as uninteresting in sociological research – such as humour, sarcasm and irony” (Constitution of Society).

A living language is primarily practical consciousness not only because it is both a medium and a product of social interaction.  It is practical consciousness because, in every living language, most ordinary speakers or most native speakers know and use the linguistic rules, and the exceptions to these rules, without being able to state or explain them adequately.

Practical consciousness of a rule involves genuine knowledge or skill that is learned and taught in the doing, and somebody who has mastery of a rule rarely has to “interpret” or “think” (or “talk to some inner self” about) that rule while enacting that rule (New Rules).

Rules and skills for an interaction are not only linguistic.  They include the continuous monitoring of one’s body, of the other bodies present, of the resources the bodies carry, and the setting of the interaction.  Thus, an understanding of rules is inadequate when it is not closely connected to the use or the availability of resources.  Practical consciousness is tacit knowledge of how to proceed, how to go on, especially in the day-to-day contexts of social existence.

In a routine context of interaction, practical consciousness is expressed in a procession of gestures, facial expressions, and conventional remarks, each one of which is, in that context, regular or rational enough so much so that neither the agents nor participant observers see the need for an explanation of each act right after each act is done.  Practical consciousness, however, is not mechanical, no matter how routine is the context.

Practical consciousness entails a continuous monitoring of both one’s own and the other’s behaviour, for the regularity or rationality of even a small gesture does not depend on the gesture itself but on its timeliness and position within the continuous process of an interaction in a specific setting.

For example, a simple smile, which had passed unremarked in one moment, could provoke a demand for an explanation if inserted in another moment or in a different setting.  Any agent could be queried also about one’s untimely silence or pause in a conversation.

To routinely know both the convenient and the inconvenient continuities and discontinuities of interaction in a particular context entails skills that mostly have been learned after a long period of time or after repeated immersions in such or similar contexts.

Language as Structure

A good example of a structure is a living language, which binds a particular people and their practices across the generations and across distances.  Language is a structure that is both a medium and an outcome during instances of communication.  This necessary medium, the irreducible linguistic structure, is implicit in every instance of intelligible communication.
 
Every intelligible sentence exchanged by talkers, for example, presupposes a practical mastery of the grammar, the syntax, and the morphology of the language in use.  The talkers do not make use of all the possible linguistic rules for every sentence, but every intelligible utterance entails, none the less, a prodigious and complex set of rules.  This set of rules becomes effectively present in its absence, in its evanescent instantiation in every sentence spoken.
 
“Language is what language does” (Social Theory and Modern Sociology), or “language is practical consciousness” (Karl Marx).  Language is practical, as it facilitates social intercourse, which reproduces it as a social product.  A living language is never private property, and it can never be withheld from the other talkers, who regularly appropriate it.
 
The regular use of language by every communicative person renders the linguistic structure not only present but also evanescent, as every intelligible expression momentarily reproduces and potentially modulates the structure.  As an intelligible expression unfolds in empirical time-space, the linguistic structure is reproduced in virtual time-space.
 
A good illustration of the practical, pliable, and evanescent aspects of the linguistic structure is the phenomenon of the ordinary conversation, which never entails strict rules.  Within the flow of conversation, some half-sentences, subjectless remarks, verbless expressions, and prepositional phrases can become crucial moments of communication. 
 
The actual intelligibility of grammatically vague or mangled expressions disrupts the linguistic structure and “corrupts” or modifies its rules.  Yet it is precisely the practical mastery of the rules of a particular language, as is usually the case with native speakers, which enables conversationalists every now and then to suspend some of the rules without thereby turning their talk into a babel of voices.  The competent suspension of rules is an instance of the presence-in-absence of structure.
 
Today, most non-aboriginal languages have grammatical rules and standard lexical items in writing, but the practical reality of a living language enables some widely-used slang and colloquial expressions to be accepted eventually into formal speech and writing.  Furthermore, every standard lexical item can acquire novel connotations or even additional definitions through frequent application outside the usual contexts.
 
In the same process, formal expressions can fall into such disuse that they eventually disappear even from specialized texts.  This is a continuous process of the appearance, disappearance, and modification of the verbal expressions and their connotations, and thus the linguistic structure is never, at any moment, simply itself.

A private act of an individual agent, however, does not introduce a modification of the linguistic structure or of any structure whatsoever.  A linguistic, normative, or domination structure can undergo modification within a system of interaction and not through a private individual act.

 
The actual intelligibility of vague or inexact expressions, especially during conversation, depends on a mastery not only of linguistic rules, but more so, of corporal and contextual rules and resources.  A mastery of these rules and resources entails a “ramified control of the body and a developed knowledge of how to ‘go on’ in the plurality of contexts of social life” (Constitution of Society).

The spatio-temporal nature of the body, its movements, and the setting of the interaction can often determine the meaning of expressions to a greater degree than formal linguistic rules can.  In the flow of a conversation, for example, a mangled verbal expression can become instantly intelligible within a certain timing, spacing, and positioning of the body and its movements: the speed of gestures, the rise and fall of the voice, the inclination of the head, the facial expression, and the overall posture.

The timing-spacing of the body in day-to-day contexts is an effective expression of the practical consciousness of the agent.  This practical consciousness includes the monitoring and the use of contextual resources, the resources on the interacting bodies, the resources these bodies bring, and the resources near at hand.  For example, power-dressing (religious, military, formal, fashionable, or expensive attire) influences interaction in many contexts.

Structure and System

“In structuration theory structure has always to be conceived of as a property of social systems, carried in reproduced practices embedded in time and space” (Constitution of Society). Structures exist as structural properties of social systems, and interacting agents reproduce these properties, which are momentary media and effects of interaction. As for social systems, Anthony Giddens says:


“Social systems are systems of social interaction; as such they involve the situated activities of human subjects, and exist syntagmatically in the flow of time. Systems…are not structures in themselves. Structures…are characterised by the ‘absence of a subject.’” (Central Problems)

Giddens wants structures to be distinguished from systems; he posits that interacting agents reproduce them at distinguishable levels; the level of virtual time-space for structures, and the level of empirical time-space for systems.

Giddens conceives a structure as a set of memory-traces that momentarily fuse future, past, and present; thus, in this momentary fusion, structure exists in virtual time-space. These memory-traces are continually reproduced, fused, fragmented, and instantiated in the social practices that compose the process of action and interaction.

As sets of memory-traces, structures make it possible for interacting agents to perceive and produce continuities and discontinuities, similarities and differences, in their practices across generations and across distances in time-space. For Giddens, the general effect of structures, or of structural properties, is the binding of time-space in social systems. “Structure is what gives form and shape to social life, but it is not itself that form and shape;” the form and shape, the pattern across time-space, is system (“Reply to My Critics”).

More concretely, structures “can be understood as rules and resources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems” (Central Problems). A rule here should be understood as a tacit generalizable procedure of interaction. As rules, structures include contextual, corporal and communication rules.

For example, in the face-to-face conversation, there are tacit rules as regards taking turns and maintaining some eye contact. Another example, in the restaurant context, the kitchen is, as a rule, off-limits to customers. Rules are not necessarily fixed; they can become points of periodic disputes, and they are alterable.

“All social rules have both constitutive and regulative (sanctioning) aspects to them;” they relate not only to matters that occur but also to those that are expected to occur in an interaction. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein, Giddens affirms that to know a rule is to know how to proceed or how to go on in an interaction. Furthermore, “to know how to go on is not necessarily, or normally, to be able to formulate clearly what the rules are” (Central Problems).

Social rules get translated into action in conjunction with resources: the resources on interacting agents (dress and ornamentation), the resources these agents bring (money, a weapon, a sacred object, or symbolic tokens), and the resources near at hand or within the setting of the interaction.

By themselves, resources are not structural properties of social systems; they become structural properties only in conjunction with knowing how to use them or with some familiarity with the rules of their use. “Stone walls do not a prison make, rather the human, and modifiable, [rule-governed] practices of imprisonment” (William Outhwaite).

For Giddens, structural properties have “no existence independent of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in their day-to-day activity” (Constitution of Society). Thus, as rules and resources, structures are forms of knowledge-capability. This connects directly with the concept of structures as sets of memory-traces that make possible the enactment of social practices, which instantiate, or reproduce simultaneously and momentarily, these memory-traces.

Agency and Structure

To be sustainable, social reform for the common good entails structural changes.  But what is structural change and how is it done?  The structuration theory of Anthony Giddens can help answer the question.

Giddens distinguishes between structure and system, and asserts “the duality of structure.”  He writes: “by the duality of structure I mean that social structure is both constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the very medium of this constitution” (New Rules). 

 
Structure and agency form a duality, which Giddens distinguishes from a dualism.  He regards the two aspects of a duality as correlated and interdependent with neither aspect as equivalent nor reducible to the other.  In contrast, aspects of a dualism necessarily oppose or exclude each other.

The concept of the duality of structure rejects the perception that structure is some steel cage that encloses agents who are interacting within the cage, have been interacting before being in the cage, and can interact outside it.  For Giddens, structure enters into the very constitution of action and interaction.  Structure is both a medium and an outcome of agency, and thus, “structure must not be conceptualized as simply placing constraints upon human agency, but as enabling” (New Rules).  Structural constraint and empowerment also form a duality.

 
The constraint-empowerment duality is illustrated well by the process of learning a language.  Giddens says:

“Since any language constrains thought (and action) in the sense that it presumes a range of framed, rule-governed properties, the process of language learning sets certain limits to cognition and activity.  But by the very same token the learning of a language greatly expands the cognitive and practical capacities of the individual.” (New Rules)

 
For example, training a child how to communicate verbally, how to substitute words and sentences for its cries and screams, is a form of social pressure.  Yet undeniably, such training empowers the child.

For another example of structural constraint cum empowerment, one can refer to the method of scientific practice.  The scientific method requires the following of some procedures and the avoidance of other procedures in the pursuit of reliable knowledge.  Whether in science or in education, a degree of discipline is required from the participants, and this discipline is both constraining and enabling.

For another illustration, consider the practice of dressing formally.  It disposes the wearers and observers to do some gestures or types of behaviour and to avoid others.  A structure is comparable to a perspective, which enables one to focus on certain phenomena while inhibiting or blurring the vision of other phenomena.  Thus, to say that structure only constrains is like saying that one’s eyes only prevent one from seeing directly the back of one’s head.

 
The constraint-empowerment duality applies to each and every participant of an interaction.  No participant is merely constrained or merely empowered, although in many contexts of interaction, some participants do tend to be more constrained or more empowered than the others.

As conceptualized by Giddens, the duality of structure denies determinism, whether economic, technological, bureaucratic, or cultural.  “Determinism…refers to any theoretical scheme which reduces human action solely to event causality,” which Giddens contrasts with “agent causality” (New Rules). 

Agent causality and the duality of structure are meant to be interlocked concepts, and thus, both have to be understood neither in a voluntaristic nor a deterministic sense.  “The conception of agency in structuration theory resists the polarities of both thoroughgoing determinism and unqualified freedom, while preserving all possibilities between these extremes” (Ira Cohen).

 
If one wants the common good to be the fruit of structural changes in the economic, political and cultural realms, social reformers have to clarify to themselves what forms of empowerment and constraint would new structures yield and what groups would likely end up more empowered and more constrained in their social interactions.