2.4 Signs of Consolation: “Take Courage!”
Design seeks to produce a preferred state of affairs; equally, semioethics analyzes signs to emerge practical implications. Their convergence in this new, thomistic, semioethic design of the signs of God ought therefore to entail, one would expect, practical implications that are beneficial: indeed for many, as it is for Augustine and Aquinas, such signs of a real powerful presence, to whom the whole of creation bends in obediental potency by the sheer duress of its contingently gifted existence, may well be signs of consolation (Barron, 1996; also Gully, 1961: 47-48), precisely if in one’s quest to realize his friendship in accord with practical right reason (recta ratio) as prescribed by the natural law (see above, Chua, 2012a), one’s professional and hence design choices and logics (including administrative, managerial and leadership decisions) in their focal senses (see above; ibid.) are barely appreciated, or are at other times contradicted and misunderstood, and then passed on and derided, or test our courage and the security of those we love and care for. Thus Robert Barron (1996: 86) who teases out the consoling significance of Aquinas’ metaphysics of being writes:
“God [for Aquinas] is not incidentally or provisionally present to the things of the world; nor is God present only to some and not to others, as some philosophies hold. No, God is, in the most startling way, in the things that [he] continually makes…Thomas is echoing in more sober language Augustine’s magnificent assertion that God is intimior intimo meo (closer to me than I am to myself, nearer to me than that which is nearest to me).”
In other words, these thomistic signs, once semio-ethically designed, point to truths that help us confront positively the problem of apparent unmerited evil, holding back despair and debilitating confusion and sadness, even though the consolation of such signs is very far from the hope of a complete solution that fully quickens, but which now gathers greater plausibility. For professionals who design (c.f. Simon, 1996), dealing on a daily basis with ill-defined, wicked problems (see Chua 2008), with little supportive consensus from colleagues, such semio-ethic sources of fortitude will matter greatly, especially during those dark nights of the professional’s soul (c.f. Ball 2003; see also Chua 2009b) when struggling with speech-discourses laden with vocational values (oratio: see Chua 2009b:164; also March, 1982) to exorcise the terrors of performative pressures to compromise the good, the just and the beautiful, and the temptation to call it a day.
Such thomistic signs are even more pertinent, perhaps, for the professional under employment, whose courage on behalf of the good and just must be supererogatory. For: without the comfortable luxury of being what Frederic Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty calls the “man of independent means”, a “private owner of substantial property” (Hayek, 2011: 190), he is not free from the duress of being subject, economically, to another’s coercion (Hayek, 1944, 2011) and hence the courageous defense of the good and right cannot be expected to be easily forthcoming. Even more so, if David Harvey’s erroneous prescriptions in his The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (2010) on behalf of Marxism see light. His incoherent pretensions of critical morality commends his readers to confront Hayek’s defense of private property “head-on” in order to effectively challenge “capital accumulation and the reproduction of class power” (p. 233), but ironically portends the social and political conditions under central planning that will stifle the promotion of the good and the just, as much as concentrations of economic powers in the name of redistribution subject all others to coercive duress, and thus leaves these semio-ethical signs of comfort and their design with even greater responsibility for nurturing heroic bravery.