THEÂ CITYÂ On the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, remarks by Calvin Coolidge on July 5th, 1926. Our forefathers came to certain conclusions and decided upon certain courses of action which have been a great blessing to the world. Before we can understand their conclusions we must go back and review the course which they followed. We must think the thoughts which they thought. Their intellectual life centered around the meetinghouse. They were intent upon religious worship. While there were always among them men of deep learning, and large possessions, the mind of the people was not engrossed in how much they knew, or how much they had, as in how they were going to live. While scantily provided with other literature, there was a wide acquaintance with the Scriptures. They were subject to this discipline not only in their religious life and educational training, but also in their political thought. They were a people under the influence of a great spiritual development who acquired a great moral power. No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.
A publication of Houston Baptist University
SUMMER 2011
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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred McClay Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughlin Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Trevino THE CITY Volume IV, Issue 2 Copyright 2011 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Bill Barfield. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org. 2
4CONTENTS$ Renewing the Liberal Arts Louis Markos Bradley G. Green John Mark Reynolds
4 14 20
The Path Ahead A Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld Paul D. Miller on How We Engage the World Peter Augustine Lawler on Learning from Tocqueville D.C. Innes on Trust in Politics
27 39 58 66
Books & Culture Maureen Mullarkey on the Fallacy of Art Appreciation Nathan Finn on God’s Country Ryan T. Anderson on Redeeming Economics David J. Davis on Secularism Micah Mattix on the Politicized Bard
70 76 81 92 97
A Republ ic of Letter s Hunter Baker
102
Poetry by Geoffrey Brock
26, 101
The Word by John Henry Newman
: 3
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R ENEWING THE L IBERAL A RTS [the0way0forward{ Louis Markos
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his fall, Houston Baptist University will unveil our new Liberal Arts Core: a carefully constructed and coordinat‐ ed curriculum that includes classes in literature and for‐ eign language, Christian history and theology, Western and American history, philosophy and logic, government and economics, art and music, and math and science.
It will not be a loose and fashionable cafeteria plan, where students choose whatever strikes their fancy, but a true classical‐Christian core, in which students are invited into the great conversation that begins with the Bible and Homer and continues into the twenty‐first century. It will not be narrowly utilitarian in focus, seeking only to train its charges for a specific skill or career, but broadly liberal, seek‐ ing to free the mind from the idols of the marketplace and equip it for critical thinking and creative contemplation. It will be conveyed not through textbooks, which seek to bend the past to fit our own modern prejudices and presuppositions, but the actual books them‐ selves, treated as repositories of the wisdom of the past and vehicles for reaching at transcendent, cross‐cultural truths. It will not be driv‐ en by the social sciences, with their reductive and mechanistic view of man as a product of social‐political‐economic forces, but by the humanities, with their ennobled yet realistic view of man as a crea‐ ture made in God’s image but fallen and in a state of rebellion. It will not be postmodern and multicultural, offering a relativistic view of knowledge that doubts not only the existence of Truth but our ability to know or communicate it, but traditional and holistic, seeking after a unified vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 4
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Most of all, our Core will be unapologetic in its belief that Great Books and Ideas do exist and that a direct wrestling with such Books and Ideas offers one of the best training grounds for shaping virtu‐ ous, morally self‐regulating citizens who love God and their neigh‐ bor. In short, it will be cutting edge… for the fourteenth century! Imagine, then, my delight when I read Bradley G. Green’s The Gos‐ pel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Crossway, 2010) and found in its pages a powerful Christian‐humanist vision of education that complements in the theoretical realm what my uni‐ versity is about to do in the practical. Green’s book is inspiring and highly‐readable—and it serves, in this issue of THE CITY, as an ap‐ propriate focal point for a discussion of the liberal arts: what they are today, and what they can be.
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reen, associate professor of Christian studies at Union Uni‐ versity and co‐founder of the liberal arts‐focused (and ap‐ propriately named) Augustine School, is a man on a mission. His well‐researched book is not content merely to suggest that Chris‐ tianity and the intellectual life are compatible. Green makes it clear that “the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life.” Sever the mind from the gospel, and you eventually end up with the situation that reigns on most college campuses today: a val‐ ues‐free zone with no moral standards to determine that which is good, no aesthetic touchstones to determine that which is beautiful, and no accepted canon—biblical or otherwise—to determine that which is true. Or as Green boldly and succinctly expresses it:
As the modern world has jettisoned its Christian intellectual inheritance, there has been a corresponding confusion about the value of the mind, even of the possibility of knowledge at all, whether of God or of the created order. Green begins his book with a simple statement of historical fact that has been overlooked and obscured by the Academy:
[W]herever the gospel takes hold of a culture, you inevitably see academies, schools, and institutions of learning develop. They develop not only to teach people how to read and understand the Bible, as important and central as that is. But wherever the gospel goes, it seems to generate intellectual deliberation and inquiry. 5
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I constantly have to remind my students—and myself, since I too am a product of two‐and‐a‐half centuries of Enlightenment propagan‐ da—that the Catholic Church did not usher in the Dark Ages; quite to the contrary, it was the Church that ushered Europe out of the Dark Ages. It was the Church as well that invented the university and laid the theological, philosophical, and aesthetic groundwork for the arts and sciences. True, it was Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (and their respective dis‐ ciples and schools) who gave birth to the humanistic ideal of knowledge pursued for its own sake; but it was the Church that not only spread that ideal to a wider audience and institutionalized it, but gave it a firm foundation it lacked in ancient Greece. Apart from the central Christian beliefs—that we were created in the image of a holy, transcendent God who is the origin and standard of goodness, truth, and beauty, that history is meaningful, that though we are fall‐ en God intervened within human history to redeem our hearts, souls, and minds, and that God as Logos guarantees the meaningfulness of language—the intellectual life cannot thrive.
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erhaps the most shocking aspect of HBU’s new Liberal Arts Core is that it will require all students to take four semesters of Western and American history. Of all the humanistic disci‐ plines, history has perhaps suffered the most. What little “history” our primary, secondary, and college‐aged students receive today is more often than not a disguised form of anthropology (studying the rites and rituals of native American Indians), sociology (exploring how political and economic networks of power determine the way people think and behave), or soft Marxism (exposing how minorities and the lower classes have been consistently oppressed by aristo‐ crats, clerics, and the bourgeoisie). Though it is a good thing for stu‐ dents, especially Christian students, to be aware of the injustices in our world and to be encouraged to use their God‐given gifts to help alleviate some of those injustices, such “consciousness raising” does little to train students in history. In fact, if truth be told, it generally dismisses, if not altogether obliterates, history as history. Talk to anyone who has been educated since the 1960’s, and you will find that they have very little sense of the shape of history. They may recognize such names as Pericles or Caesar or Charlemagne or Elizabeth, but they lack the ability to place those names into a histori‐ cal narrative. The rise and fall of kingdoms—and the virtuous and 6
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vicious decisions of the great men and women who provoked their rise and fall—has far less resonance in the modern mind than today’s stock market figures, or yesterday’s political scandal, or the box office records of the latest action film. Mesmerized by a simplistic, evolutionary view of intellectual, aes‐ thetic, and moral progress, we take for granted that we are in the right and they (the unenlightened people of the past) were wrong. Such a view of our tradition and our forebears breeds arrogance— C.S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery”—and cuts us off from all that we might learn from a full engagement with the past. There was a time when our colleges and universities stemmed such arrogance by immersing their students in the Great Books and Ideas of the Western Intellectual Tradition, but that time is long gone. “While the academy used to be a stronghold of love for the past— relishing old books, old languages, old truths—the contemporary academy,” Green laments, “seems to have lost its nerve in regard to the importance of the past and often seems little concerned with passing on an intellectual tradition.” When God was removed from the public square in general and the academy in particular—or re‐ placed by a deistic, watchmaker God who is uninvolved in history— the educated elite slowly replaced reverence and gratitude for the past with utopian, progressivist visions for the future. In the absence of a Creator God whose sovereign plans are worked out, in part, through historical events and human agents, the past was eventually reduced to a curiosity shop for antiquarians, or worse still, a burden to be cast off by those seeking intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic liberation. Together, we reaped the pedagogical harvest of the secular humanist field sown during the Enlightenment. When the university came to view history not as an authoritative teacher to turn to for insight and guidance but as a false path to turn from on the evolutionary road to enlightenment, it lost its faith in the value of history, and, by extension, the value of the liberal arts as the prime training ground for the life of the mind. While Green, backed by the weight of Augustine and the medieval tradition, asserts that “any truly Christian and liberal education will be one in which stu‐ dents are immersed in the central texts of the past—the literature, history, philosophy, and theology of millennia,” the majority of American universities, both secular and religious, have traded in their liberal arts core for utilitarian programs that eschew the “central 7
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texts of the past” in favor of skill‐based classes marked by contempo‐ rary relevance. Historian Thomas Cahill has famously argued that a group of iso‐ lated Irish monks helped “save” civilization by preserving Greek and Roman classics from the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. In a similar way, Green calls on Christians to preserve—and, hopefully, revive—the value and centrality of the liberal arts: not though the medium of illuminated manuscripts but by building “pockets of sani‐ ty” where the Tradition is actively and creatively remembered.
In an age that does not place a high premium on the past (likely a result of unbelief), Christians must see themselves as countercultural in their emphasis on memory and must be particularly diligent to cultivate and practice the habit of remembering. Remembering is—ultimately—a virtue. And given that our culture discourages this particular virtue, Christians must find ways of intentionally cultivating this practice. Although the Church should ever be the primary “pocket” for keeping alive the memory of “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), when it comes to that wider historical memory that takes in “the literature, history, philosophy, and theolo‐ gy of millennia,” it is the Christian universities—and, increasingly, classical‐Christian academies like Green’s Augustine school—that are best poised to preserve and promote the remembrance of things past.
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base‐level commitment to memory is indeed essential if Christian universities are to reclaim and rehabilitative the life of the mind—but it is not enough. Along with acknowl‐ edging God’s sovereignty over creation and history, we must accept and teach that history is going somewhere: that it not only has an ultimate origin (Greek: arche) but a purposeful end (telos). Though modern utopianism, progressivism, and scientism all look to the future, the vision that underlies them is not, at least in the bib‐ lical sense, teleological or eschatological. They put their faith in the future that they long to build, but they do not trust that that future has been envisioned by the God of history and hardwired into us by our Creator. “Instead of seeing motion as headed somewhere,” Green explains, “modern thinkers came to see motion as simply motion, with no particular goal or end in sight.” Or, to put it another way: history can (and should) be manipulated by advances in technology, 8
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but that does not mean it is inherently meaningful or is moving to‐ ward a mythical appointment with destiny. According to Green, “the notion that we are all pilgrims on a jour‐ ney to the city of God was the default mode of thinking, the cultural consensus of the Christian West.” It was simply understood that we, both as a species and as individual human beings, were endowed with purpose by our Creator. As a consequence of this gift, one of the key goals of our lives, our studies, and our careers was to discover and fulfill that purpose. At the highest level, that purpose was to seek after the beatific vision, to behold God, not through a glass, darkly, but face to face. Such was the supreme goal of every individual made in the image of God, a goal whose realization was aided, rather than distracted, by the cultivation of the liberal arts. In the heyday of the Christian university, “the liberal arts were not primarily skills or techniques that could be pressed into immediate service in the marketplace or used to advance oneself quickly in the world of commerce.” To the contrary, their benefits were mostly in‐ ternal: shaping and preparing soul and mind for intrinsic rewards in this life and the next. The liberal arts, writes Green, “were meant to form a certain type of person—wise, virtuous, and eloquent. Even in the temporal realm this person reflected upon—and was marked by attention to—truth, goodness, and beauty. But at the very same time, this person was being prepared for his or her ultimate destiny—the vision and contemplation of God.” Such was the high goal of the student of the liberal arts. Alas, once this telos, this purposeful end of achieving the beatific vision was abandoned by the public square, “then lost with it were the reasons for doing things that have meaning only in relationship to that larger telos”—things like studying the past through a coordinated, classical‐ Christian liberal arts core. Neither I nor Green is advocating an Enlightenment faith in the primacy of reason and the essential goodness of man, of course—we do not deny the radical nature of the Fall. All aspects of our being— physical, emotional, volitional, and rational—were subjected to the devastating impact of man’s first disobedience. One of the key rea‐ sons for Green’s argument that “the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life” is that the gospel alone has the pow‐ 9
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er to so redeem the will and reorient the mind as to set it back on a trajectory toward God and Truth.
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s he does throughout his book, Green turns first to Augus‐ tine for guidance on how faith informs and directs under‐ standing. In his survey of Augustinian insights, he quotes this trenchant sentence from On Christian Doctrine (which work will undergird “Writing for Wisdom,” HBU’s radically traditional re‐ working of freshman composition): “unless we walk by faith, we shall never be able to reach the sight which does not pass away but endures, when with our understanding purified we cleave to Truth.” Augustine does not here deny the possibility of pre‐Christian writ‐ ers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil touching on real, if limited truths about the nature of God, man, and the universe; rather, he makes plain that the final purpose (telos) of study, to prepare the mind for the beatific vision, cannot be accomplished apart from what Paul refers to as the “renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2)—and that renewing cannot be accomplished apart from the Cross. Green also surveys briefly the writings of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, focusing in particular on how they “emphasize the moral state of the knower.” Study, Green asserts, is not a morally neutral enter‐ prise: “knowledge is difficult, if not impossible, for the person whose will is misdirected, or for the person who is not led by Christ, who is the truth.” There is a deep and inextricable link here between the love of God and the love of the Good, True, and Beautiful: the one cannot exist without the other. Among the many challenges Green issues to Christian educators, this one is, I believe, the most essential:
Christians need to ask how we might construe the intellectual life in ways that are redemptive, holistic, and enduring. The life of the mind, the act of knowing, is not a morally or spiritually neutral endeavor. To truly think God’s thought after him, indeed to truly think in terms of a coherent view of the whole, we must think in a way consonant with the reality that this is God’s world as understood on God’s terms. Christians need not be embarrassed or timid about speaking about the intellectual life in explicitly Christian terms and categories. We need not be embarrassed to speak of professors as stewards of tradition and students as disciples whose study of the liberal arts will change not only their thinking but their actions, decisions, and inter‐ 10
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actions with God and neighbor. Whether in avoiding the temptation to plagiarize their essays or in understanding the proper aims of their work, the students who attend our schools are in desperate need of a wake‐up call and a reality check. Yet these students won’t get what they need until we—the administrators who run the schools and the faculty who teach the classes—come to see and understand that what we are about is serious business. Too many of us have bought in, perhaps unconsciously, to the postmodern belief that truth is elusive and cannot be contained in a canon of books or a set of doctrinal statements or a grand, overarch‐ ing story (or metanarrative) that explains why we and our world are in the state that we are. Green deftly exposes the assumption that underlies this postmodern skepticism:
The contemporary claim (heard, if in a softer form, from some Christian thinkers) that we cannot possess any sort of metanarrative explaining and giving purpose to all of human life is at its heart a rejection of the notion that God has the ability to speak, and humans have the capacity to hear and understand such speech. The Enlightenment, in its goal of refounding all knowledge on ra‐ tional principles (rather than revelation) and the collection of facts (rather than the journey toward truth), did far more than eject God from the public square: it stilled the divine Voice. Green argues, along with a number of other critics, that postmod‐ ernism (particularly deconstruction), far from rejecting the tenets of the Enlightenment, marks an extension of modernism into the lin‐ guistic realm. Once God’s Voice was silenced, it was only a matter of time before words (signifiers) became unglued from any type of final transcendent meaning (signifieds). According to Derrida and his de‐ constructive heirs, the words we use cannot be traced back to any fixed point of reference that is not itself part of our shadowy, relativ‐ istic world of signifiers. Or, to put it another way, our words, and the creeds and books and poems that are built upon them, exist in isola‐ tion from any ultimate origin (arche) or purposeful end (telos). What this linguistic entropy has meant in the real world of the classroom is that even when the liberal arts are taught, postmodern skepticism over the meaningfulness of language has prevented stu‐ dents from encountering in the Great Books of the Western Intellec‐ tual Tradition any absolute form of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty. As a 11
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result, their minds are not illuminated, their souls are not convicted, and their wills are not tempered. But this need not be the case, at least in Christian schools that be‐ lieve John’s testimony that through the Incarnation of Christ, “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Genesis tells us that God spoke the world into being, and John tells us that apart from the Word (or Logos) nothing was made (John 1:3). Genesis tells us further that we were made in the image of God, and the entire weight of scripture loudly proclaims that the God who made us is a God who speaks, who communicates. Words have meaning not only because God gives them meaning but because God himself is Mean‐ ing. And that Meaning has entered physically into our world. The Word made Flesh, in addition to giving history its middle point, bap‐ tized words (and images) as potential bearers of divine Presence. Thus it is that Green can extend his simple but profound thesis even into the daunting realm of postmodern linguistics: “Only the Christian vision of God, man, and the world can explain why words matter.” The hope remains that we in the twenty‐first century can learn, really learn, from the great writers and thinkers of the past. Modernism and postmodernism would imprison our students (and us) in a narrow contemporary box of ideas and images; the classical liberal arts, when energized by a twin belief in the Word made Flesh and the Imago Dei, can free them from that box and set them off on a great voyage of discovery.
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n The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis introduces us to a chivalrous talking mouse named Reepicheep who joins the crew of the good ship Dawn Treader in hopes that he will encounter a series of small adventures that will prepare him for the great adven‐ ture that is the unshakeable goal of his life: to reach heaven, Aslan’s country. At one point in the voyage (Chapter XII), the ship sails into an area of darkness that frightens the crew and almost convinces them to turn back. Disgusted by their cowardice, Reepicheep scolds his noble companions for letting a childish fear of the dark prevent them from exploring this strange phenomenon. The captain asks Reepicheep what possible use would be gained by sailing further into the darkness, to which the fearless mouse replies: “Use, captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an 12
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adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little im‐ peachment of all our honours.” Let it not be said that our Christian universities steered away from the honor and adventure that a full engagement with the liberal arts promises because we were blinded by an overly pragmatic (and tim‐ id) view of that which is useful. Let us instead do our best to prepare our students for the true goal for which they (and we) were made: to look on Aslan face to face.
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His two newest books are Apologetics for the 21st Century (Crossway) and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Biblica). 13
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R ESTORING THE L IBERAL A RTS 4CORAM)DEO$ Bradley G. Green “Non est consenescendum in artibus.” “One ought not grow old in the study of the arts.”
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ny true recovery of the liberal arts will be very diffi‐ cult, at least any recovery on a grand scale. Having taught in elementary, middle school, high school, col‐ lege, and seminary settings, I am pessimistic that we will see any meaningful restoration of the liberal arts in our day. It is not impossible. But before we consider the hope we should still have for the recovery of the liberal arts—even acknowl‐ edging we are hoping for nothing less than a miracle—let us under‐ stand the dire situation we face. I have taught in a Christian college setting for the last thirteen years. And for some time I have been struck by an unsettling reality: the liberal arts seem to have little or no home in the contemporary university. That is, while one often hears the language and talk of “liberal arts,” it has become increasingly obvious that the liberal arts—at least in any sense that is meaningfully connected to those words—have no real place in the contemporary college or university. At present, the duty of those who believe in the value of the liberal arts is not simply to try and improve upon the practice of the liberal arts; rather, our duty is to work to recover the liberal arts. It is not overstating the case to assert that the liberal arts—on the whole— have disappeared from the contemporary college or university. It is almost like some sort of odd science‐fiction movie. The various characters are all using a certain lingo (i.e., they speak of the “liberal arts”), but none of the characters actually know what they are talking 14
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about. They may have some vague notion of “learning” or of reading certain books. But the characters certainly do not mean “liberal arts” in any way which is meaningfully connected to the historical and traditional meaning of the term. One of the tragedies of the loss of the liberal arts itself is that we Christians are—on the whole—not versed in the ways in which the classical/Graeco‐Roman world was disrupted by the Christian under‐ standing and vision of the world which emerged in the first century and the centuries following. This transformation entailed, at times, the rejection of certain practices (say, human sacrifice), or the co‐ opting and Christianization of other practices. This latter approach is probably the category in which we have to understand Christianity’s transformation of educational practices. Traditions such as teaching grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (the trivium—or the first three liberal arts) certainly precede the Christian era. The really interesting ques‐ tions are those that ask how the reality of the Christian movement led to a reworking of the things like grammar, dialectic and rhetoric in light of the fundamental realities of the gospel.
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hen we think of recovering or rehabilitating the liberal arts, it is essential to begin with the most basic and fun‐ damental of questions. In particular, we must ask: what really are the liberal arts? Are they really worth recovering? And how might they be recovered? We need especially to think through what a Christian brings to all of these questions, first by asking in what way the Christian movement might re‐shape and reconfigure educational practice (i.e., the liberal arts) in light of distinctively Christian com‐ mitments and convictions; and second, by considering the ways in which key Christian commitments and convictions serve as the intel‐ lectual basis for the liberal arts. When we speak of the “liberal arts”, we are speaking about the tra‐ ditional seven arts usually grouped into the trivium and the quadrivi‐ um. While in the history of Western culture there have been different ways of construing and organizing these arts, we will work with what has become the “received” construal: the trivium (“three ways”), what we often think of as “language” arts, of grammar, dia‐ lectic or logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium (“four ways) , what we often think of as “mathematical” arts of arithmetic, music, geome‐ try, and astronomy. Sister Miriam Joseph could write: “The liberal arts denote the seven branches of knowledge that initiate the young 15
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into a life of learning. The concept is classical, but the term liberal arts and the division of the arts into the trivium and the quadrivium date from the Middle Ages.” While these arts have been grouped differ‐ ently at different times by different persons, for our purposes here we will take the seven arts as grouped under the trivium and quad‐ rivium as “the tradition” in this essay. Thomas Aquinas is a good example of how the liberal arts flour‐ ished and developed in Western Christendom, and of the way in which the liberal arts were brought into a coherent Christian educa‐ tional tradition. Thomas consistently speaks of a certain sequence of learning—although this could vary: 1. logic (“which transmits the method of the sciences”) 2. mathematics (“of which even boys are capable”) 3. natural philosophy (“which, because of the need of experience, requires time”) 4. moral philosophy (“of which a young man cannot be a suitable student”) 5. divine science (“which considers the first causes of beings.”). Let us tweak Thomas slightly, simply using language that is a tad more familiar and traditional: 1. Trivium—or, the traditional “language arts” of grammar, log‐ ic/dialectic, rhetoric 2. Quadrivium—or, the traditional “mathematical arts” of arithme‐ tic, music, geometry, astronomy 3. Science—or, here, the study of nature 4. Moral Philosophy—or, ethics 5. Theology With Thomas’ schema (and my slightly edited version of the sche‐ ma) before us, we can see that the liberal arts (and here we take Thomas as an exemplar of the broader perspective of Christendom), were part of a larger educational vision and its attendant set of prac‐ tices. And once this larger educational vision began to crumble—as it most certainly has—it became virtually impossible coherently to make any sort of meaningful case for the necessity of the liberal arts. The liberal arts must be recovered, not simply attended to or refur‐ bished. And central to the recovery of the liberal arts is the recovery 16
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of a certain understanding of what it means to be human and the place of mankind in history. The liberal arts flourished in a cultural and theological framework where education was seen first and foremost as the formation of a certain type of person. More important than this or that detail on exactly how one construes the nature of the liberal arts is the larger cultural and theological backdrop against which the liberal arts make sense. This would include such basic affirmations as: the created or‐ der is real, good, and able to be explored; man is a being able to grasp the “nature of things”; there are such things as truth, goodness, and beauty—and that it a right, proper, and worthy goal to want to form persons in accord with such transcendentals.
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s Christians—and perhaps Evangelicals in particular—we have more that we bring to this discussion. Given that it has often proven difficult to hold together essential Christian convictions and the nature, purpose, and practice of education, Evangelicals should be particularly intentional about exploring and retrieving what there is in our own tradition which can help us artic‐ ulate a fully Christian understanding of the educational endeavor, and to practice truly Christian education. If we are Evangelicals, what would be better than to ask what the evangel—the gospel it‐ self—has to do with the construal and practice of Christian education which takes seriously the recovery and practice of the liberal arts? The liberal arts developed and blossomed over time as part of an educational goal of forming a certain kind of person. In short, the liberal arts really only make sense against such a goal. And as that goal—the goal of forming a certain kind of person—began to lose hold or prominence in Western culture, the necessity or coherence or legitimacy of the liberal arts began to be hard to affirm. But as Chris‐ tians hammered out their understanding of the liberal arts, the goal was not simply “Theology” (or in Thomas’ word “Divine Science”) in the sense of grasping basic theological axioms (although such “grasp‐ ing” would be important). Rather, in the best Christian construals of the liberal arts, the goal was the face‐to‐face vision of God. Augustine and the medieval tradition could speak of the “beatific vision,” and Paul could write: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). 17
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The liberal arts—at their best—were part of an educational pro‐ gram and vision whereby persons were being formed into the per‐ sons they ought to be, and this forming was often articulated in terms like wisdom, virtue, and eloquence. But while persons were being formed so that they might live wise and virtuous lives in the present, the ultimate goal of education was the formation of persons for their ultimate destiny—to one day see God face‐to‐face. Thus, the liberal arts were part of an educational program whereby persons were be‐ ing formed for both wise and virtuous and eloquence lives in the present, and for their future face‐to‐face vision of God. Yet as Augustine properly asked, how can it be that we poor sin‐ ners can expect one day to see God face‐to‐face (coram deo)? Is it not the height of hubris to think that we could attain to such a grand vi‐ sion? Augustine’s conclusion, worked out in some detail in De Trini‐ tate, is that a person will see God face‐to‐face if they have been properly “fitted” and prepared for such a vision. But the only way that one can be properly fitted and prepared is for one to be changed (and indeed, cleansed) by the blood of Christ. The key to human transformation—being changed, cleansed, shaped, and formed into the persons we ought to become—is the gospel itself. Indeed, the only way we can become the persons we are called to become, to be‐ come “true men” (in C.S. Lewis’ terms), is through the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
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o if the liberal arts are about the forming of a certain kind of person, on a Christian understanding of things, the gospel is a necessary and essential part of reaching such a goal—i.e., of becoming the kind of person we are called to become. Paul could write in his letter to the church at Ephesus (Ephesians 5:25‐27) that Christ had died for sinners, and that this death leads to the ultimate transformation of God’s people—into a bride that is “holy and with‐ out blemish”, a transformation rooted in a past event which is the key to our transformation in the present and future. The liberal arts are good and proper tools which, when understood in relationship to our ultimate spiritual destiny, can well serve such a grand aim and goal. If philosophy has been at times called the ancilla theologiae (“the handmaiden of theology”), the liberal arts might be seen as the proper “handmaiden” of human transformation. The kind of human transformation God desires—by which persons are transformed and prepared to one day meet him face‐to‐face, to know 18
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and adore Him throughout all eternity—is a transformation in which the liberal arts can serve a good and right and meaningful part. The power needed for this transformation is one which is rooted in and dependent upon the gospel itself. For Christians, education at its best prepares persons for wise and virtuous lives in the present. Yet it is through the death, burial, and resurrection that persons are “fit‐ ted” and prepared for such a vision—and the liberal arts can function as an important gospel‐fueled means to prepare persons for their ultimate destiny of seeing God face‐to‐face.
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o the extent that Christians have forgotten, lost, or abandoned this larger theological backdrop and grounding of the liberal arts, the liberal arts have been lost. Ironically, while Christians have in the modern age been accused (rightly, at times) of anti‐ intellectualism, it may be the case that the only real and meaningfully hope of the recovery of the liberal arts lies in the recovery of the gos‐ pel itself, and in the recovery of a Christian understanding of God, man, and the world—and with it, a restoration of true education. The Christian invention of the university in the Middle Ages was not a historical accident, but a flowering of the manifold insights of a Christian understanding of things. While many institutions cannot at present coherently account for traditional liberal arts learning, the Christian is particularly well‐positioned to do so. Whenever the gos‐ pel has taken hold of a culture, it has been the impetus for learning and the development of educational institutions. As the gospel changed the face of Western culture this included a type of transfor‐ mation and development of the liberal arts, such that the liberal arts were pressed into the service of ultimate Christian purposes— namely, the preparation of persons for both wise and virtuous lives in the present, and for one’s ultimate encounter with God. While oth‐ er handmaidens may emerge, we would do wise to rescue the one handmaiden—the liberal arts—which has proved so useful and en‐ during. It is always unwise to spurn good gifts, and when a good gift‐giver bestows good gifts, we are wise to attend to them.
Bradley G. Green is Associate Professor of Christian Thought and Tradition at Union University and the author of The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Crossway Publishers, 2010). 19
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ADAPTING THE LIBERAL ARTS ]our0future} John Mark Reynolds
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ad was the first Reynolds in our family line to go to college in four hundred years. Not content with a magna cum laude undergraduate degree, he earned a seminary degree during a period of failed eye surger‐ ies that left him legally blind and with limited in‐ come. He received little direct government aid and graduated with no loans, the little aid he received coming from my middle‐class grandparents in West Virginia. His undergraduate experience in the late fifties at a state university was remarkably different than what my own students at Biola Uni‐ versity, a Christian school, face today. Dad entered school at the best of times and at the worst. Social rules were tighter and more pro‐ family than even my conservative school dares enforce today. He would never have gone to class without a tie, but there was a same‐ ness to dress that could be stultifying. Racism and sexism still warped his state university, but for those there, grades were not in‐ flated and his general education classes were rigorous. Dad went to small classes taught by full time professors. Students and their parents spent almost no time on paperwork, and the ad‐ ministration was tiny. He asked for little support as a disabled stu‐ dent, and received even less, though he did get free cigarettes—to encourage smoking, of course. My father was clear on why one went to college: it was a ticket to a better job and a gateway to a different class. American colleges, after World War II, existed to train and to civilize—and the tension be‐ tween these two roles was as yet unrealized. 20
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Making ladies or gentlemen requires a common culture. Job train‐ ing can be indifferent to such ideals. A cad can become a competent accountant. Traditionally, a man would hire a competent plumber with a bad world view, but not a teacher. Were professors role mod‐ els of a gentler way of living, or merely excellent at their disciplines, or both? Should Christian parents pay to have their children men‐ tored by atheists or was the atheist professor merely passing on skills? Teachers, like pastors, were supposed to model the societyʹs vision of the ʺgood lifeʺ and were held to a higher standard. In my dadʹs time, the idea that a skilled professor could lose his job for “moral turpitude” was not quite dead, but it was dying. The state university had existed to promote the values of the Republic, but soon the only value it would promote was ʺfreedom of thought.ʺ This one good would trump all the others. Taxpayers in West Virginia would soon be expected to pay to have their children mentored by teachers who despised West Virginia piety.
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ad went to school when an older generation of more tradi‐ tional professors still dominated. By my time, these men and women were mostly retired and had been replaced by teach‐ ers hired overwhelmingly for their knowledge of the field and “col‐ legiality.” By the time my children started college, the level of homo‐ geneity had risen significantly. Colleges and universities had cast off any sense of educating to fit the student for the society in which they would live, instead emphasizing the Socratic “gadfly” role. Oddly, this meant that a college town in Alabama has more in common with Berkeley than it has with the folk in the county next door—and no sane parent would expect much ideological or social difference be‐ tween a university in Texas and one in California Students demanded to be treated as “adults,” even as they lived in settings increasingly insulated from the adult world. Dorms are noth‐ ing like apartments, and college social life would be disastrous for any business HR department. Where my father’s college attempted to shape his personal values, it did so mostly in accord with the views of his parents. Schools now concentrate on shaping values, but in ways purposefully cut off from the views of their parents and com‐ munities. My dad was as unlikely to meet a professor openly advo‐ cating what was quaintly called “free love” as a present student is to find one opposed to gay marriage. Academic freedom is good, but it is now the only good fiercely defended by the professoriate. Only the 21
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professoriate is deemed fit to judge the moral message of the profes‐ soriate, when there is one. Why have parents and taxpayers put up with this situation? It is because the main role of college in their minds is “job preparation.” They have come to expect, if they are conservative or moderate, that the college experience will attack their values in ways large and small. They hope their children will survive the process, but they donʹt like it. Administrators have increased their ranks while classes have gotten larger. Many professors are part time and underpaid, while the number of vice‐provosts blossom—and professors in the “general education” are under great pressure to inflate grades, to which they all too often bend. Precious few public university graduates gain critical thinking skills. Instead, many possess useless shibboleths that might pass them through to academic jobs. Sadly, this encourages the view that college is only about a middle class union card. Anti‐intellectualism can flourish in a world where people are more aware of how little value their undergraduate degrees have in their search for a job—this year, the jobless rate those with a bachelorʹs degree rose to the high‐ est percentage in recorded history. State school tuitions have soared and most students graduate with debt, and in the case of private schools, often crippling debt. And while American colleges remain world class in teaching job skills in areas such as science, law, and medicine, many majors have no correlation with any job at all. In the vast majority of colleges and universities, majors have bal‐ looned without evidence that they prepare a student for anything. A degree, for its own sake, has been viewed as a ticket to the middle class or at least a safety net stretched above the lower. Professors still mentor students, but fewer and fewer at the undergraduate level have the time to do so. And when mentoring does happen, there is no quality control mechanism—in part because there is no accounta‐ bility to the taxpayers or parents for the values professors choose to espouse. Professors demand that they be paid to pass on any values they choose regardless of what the citizens or parents wish. There is a problem that flows as an undercurrent beneath all this: fewer Americans understand the essential goal of a traditional liberal education: to form character, enable human flourishing, and make useful citizens for the republic. Doing this well depends on three 22
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necessary conditions: fit mentors, a vision of what the good life is, and a strong core curriculum to pass the wisdom of the ages forward.
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his situation cannot endure, and it is about to change. New media and technological advancement will transform higher education in much the same way it has changed the enter‐ tainment industry. Within the next twenty years, many mediocre schools will close, particularly in private and religious education. Many Americans have been alienated from the liberal arts. While most parents want to expose their child to other points of view through the educational process, traditionalist parents rarely see their own views supported. Citizens do not perceive colleges as giv‐ ing free market ideals a fair shake, and justly question the utility of using their tax money to produce an artistic and educated class al‐ ienated from the nation they will be called to lead. In the new media world, information is free or nearly free. Infor‐ mation will soon be distributed through the effective use of technol‐ ogy in all areas of education. Of course, professional education will remain on site as the apprenticeship of fields which demand it. At hundreds of weaker liberal arts colleges, however, the money‐ making general education classes with their swollen numbers and part‐time teachers will perish. Such students are already missing essential elements to a liberal education: mentoring, a strong core curriculum, and character formation programs tied to societal needs. Only the insiderʹs game of accreditation has protected weaker state and private colleges from free market alternatives. A future admin‐ istration will lower this barrier and colleges will face for the first time the chill winds of competition. The old tuition model, which depends on hoarding knowledge, will die in these schools as expensive major classes will no longer be subsidised by general education. The golden age of the entrepreneurial professor will dawn. Online accredited universities will be conglomerates of successful teachers spread across many nations. Conservative or traditionalist parents will no longer have to pay for an on‐site class from an ill paid adjunct professor in a class of hundreds when they can choose a congenial on‐line class from a super‐prof they prefer. Such low or no cost clas‐ ses will transfer into the school of choice as ʺgeneral education units.ʺ It will be no use for most schools to complain of the missing men‐ toring or diversity elements in such education. Schools gave up on 23
THE CITY
that element for most students long ago and only the highly motivat‐ ed student or one attending rare elite schools receive a mentoring education at all. Those who do receive mentoring frequently have mentors hostile to the values of those paying the bills. Of course, real liberal education as discipleship for living faces no danger from the new world. Just as a small number of people will still pay for an in‐ carnate musical experience, so will some seek personal mentoring and good guides. And they will be the successful ones.
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art of the American college experience is a rite of passage to adulthood and getting away from home is part of it. Ameri‐ cans can no longer afford the staggering costs that now come with such growth. So education will change.
The good news is that this is a moment of great opportunity for a few schools. Leadership in schools has been stagnant for some time with the best schools getting better and the rest limping along. Most wealthy schools will survive, though they too will change, but a few up and coming schools will embrace the new world and thrive. How will these schools invigorate the liberal arts? First, schools will identify the constituency they serve. They will do this by having a strong vision of what a good and happy human is and does. Schools such as Brigham Young or Thomas Aquinas Col‐ lege are good models. They know their niche and their core constitu‐ ency trusts them. Second, the surviving schools will slash the number of administra‐ tors quickly. Most positions will blend teaching, mentoring, and ad‐ ministration. Faculty size will increase, classes will be smaller, but the role of faculty will change. The “sage on the stage” will be no more, and the mentor and role model will be the norm. Faculty will spend substantial time mentoring between twenty and twenty‐five students over the four years a student is in school. Third, electives, majors, and many grad programs will be eliminat‐ ed or consolidated. Most small liberal arts colleges should cease pre‐ paring students as if they face an academic future and instead pre‐ pare the student to leave school. The emphasis should be on numeracy, general cultural and scientific knowledge, reading well, communicating effectively, and fluency in at least two languages. Fourth, funding mechanisms will change. Majors leading directly to employment that are expensive, such as nursing, will continue to 24
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charge. Colleges must give liberal arts information away for free, but they can charge for time with faculty and incarnate experiences. Students seeking mere credentials and job skills should get them from a combination of online and on‐site courses in practical majors. Students seeking a liberal arts degree will find their campus the world and their faculty located all over the globe. The liberal arts campus of the future has no boundaries. Students will study the Old Testament in Palestine, Rome in Rome, and English literature in the Lake District. Faculty will act as facilitators and guides. Units can be taken on the Internet, but a discussion at the Hagia Sophia on reli‐ gious toleration between a scholar and a small group of students cannot be replaced. You can listen to a lecture on iTunes, but you cannot climb Mars Hill with me online. Change is coming quickly, but not so quickly that schools lack time to act. Money must be raised, faculty consulted, and decisions made decently and in order. Moving too slowly will only mean change will come in crisis. We are not so far gone that all the captains of industry have forgotten the value for their fellow citizens to gain an education in virtue. Are there not leaders who would give to a school that in‐ culcated Christian values, but taught students critical thinking, a program that embraces republican values while presenting alterna‐ tives? I believe there exists millions who would embrace a place committed to the arts, not for artʹs sake, but for Godʹs sake. The future for many institutions is grim, but it is bright for the lib‐ eral arts. My grandchildren, if I have any, will be able to get a better education than either my father or I received. The power of technolo‐ gy combined with incarnate mentoring can, and I believe will, bring on a renaissance of this republic and Christendom. In taking this path, we are returning to the ancient roots of the University, and in so doing, we will produce strong men and women for our republic, and subjects for Christendom. And this, after all, is our highest aim.
John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rochester. His most recent book is When Athens Met Jerusalem (IVP, 2009). 25
THE CITY
Father Countries Geoffrey Brock The first true human, Cain was born in sorrow. Adam covered his ears as his son crowned, As Eve fathomed her curse. Cain made no sound. Cain the man cleared the chamomile and yarrow, Conceived the scythe, the digging stick, the furrow, Coaxed wheat and emmer from the wounded ground, And sacrificed. Searching the sky, Cain found Only God’s vast back turned, spined by a sparrow.
The first to kill, the first to be unbrothered, Cain ached to see God’s face, even in anger. Some sheep came wandering by; they ate the wheat. A spotted moon rose; all the emmer withered. And Cain, soon to father countries of hunger, Slaughtered a lamb and salted its bright meat.
Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light and the editor of the forthcoming FSG Book of 20 t h Century Italian Poetry. He teaches poetry and translation in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Arkansas. 26
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RUMSFELD & HIS CREED [known0and0unknown{ A Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld Benjamin Domenech for The City: We are honored to have as our guest for this issue’s interview Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most influential public servants in American history. His recent best‐selling memoir, Known and Unknown (Sentinel, 2011), caps a career which saw him serve as both the youngest and the oldest person to serve as Secretary of Defense. For half a century, he has played a prominent role in shaping global affairs and the foreign, trade, and defense policy of the nation. He spoke to us in his Washington office. According to your book, we share a hero, albeit in different formats. When I was young I would get up at 5:00 in the morning to see the Lone Ranger on television in black and white.
Donald Rumsfeld: Oh, you’re too young. He was long gone be‐ fore you got there.
The City: They still ran it at 5:00 a.m. Rumsfeld: Is that right? The City: And I’m still berated by my parents for the one morning when my younger brother was born and our babysitter allowed me to sleep in. And when she woke me up to tell me I had a new brother, the first words out of my mouth were: “You made me miss the Lone Ranger!”
Rumsfeld: (laughs) Did you read the Lone Ranger’s creed? The City: Yes, I did. [Editor’s note—the creed reads: “I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one. That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world. That God 27
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put the firewood there but that every man must gather and light it himself. In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right. That a man should make the most of what equipment he has. That ʹThis government, of the people, by the people and for the peo‐ pleʹ shall live always. That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number. That sooner or later... somewhere...somehow... we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken. That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever. In my Crea‐ tor, my country, my fellow man.”]
Rumsfeld: It still seems pretty sensible. The City: It does, doesn’t it? Rumsfeld: Yes, it makes sense. It seems… right. The City: Is it heroes like that who inspired you to get involved in the world the way that you have, or was it more just sort of life experience that brought you to that point naturally? That just the opportunities presented themselves and you took them?
Rumsfeld: I think the latter. I mean, the reason I put the Lone Ranger in there was to give some perspective on the fact that televi‐ sion didn’t exist—radio did. That it was the kind of program that appealed to a young man because it talked about the West. Back in those days, we didn’t have airplanes flying around all over America. And the West was kind of the frontier for our country, and exciting, and interesting, and a little mysterious. And then of course there was the values in that creed. I think that the only things I ever really volunteered for, or sought, was to go in the Navy and to run for Congress. All the other things I’ve done somebody came to me and said, “Would you do this?” And “We’d like you to do this.” It’s just been amazing to have that, all those opportunities to do so many interesting things in business, in government, in the executive, and the legislative arenas, in the White House, in foreign policy, in defense, and economic matters, and do‐ mestic matters. And to do it with, you know, four presidents and have a chance to see the country evolve as it has over a third of its history.
The City: I was struck, in watching so many of your appearances, the dif‐ ficulty that the interviewers have with how to handle you. You have an in‐ credible capacity for remembering all of these details and all of these different 28
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events. And coming back up and arguing the points with them from a real respite of knowledge that is astounding, given sort of the breadth of experi‐ ence you’ve had in life and all of these different stories and all of these anti‐ dotes.
Rumsfeld: Breadth and length? The City: What struck me in particular about it is how much it frustrat‐ ed interviewers who, it seemed, came to it loaded for bear, thinking that they were going to get you in some moment, or get you in some conflict with yourself in the past. Why do you think that you are a figure who brings that out of them? Rumsfeld: I don’t have any idea. I’ve been active in so many things over so many years that I suppose when someone is interviewing me they have a perspective, and the perspective is based on snippets of things that have occurred during their working life, which is just a part of my working life generally. It’s probably an impression that is an aggregation of things that they’ve heard from people who weren’t there. I was there. There’s a difference.
The City: It gives one the advantage of perspective. Rumsfeld: Yeah. And I have just this wonderful archive. That is what drove me to spend four years writing the book rather than one year, because there was such rich material there of notes that I’d made. I don’t have a diary, or a journal, or anything like that, but I dictated notes after every vote in Congress. For example, during the Vietnam War and the civil rights period—an interesting period in our history—I have notes on how I voted, and why I voted the way I vot‐ ed. And then all the memos in the Pentagon and then the White House for four different presidents. The City: Why did you start taking those notes in the first place? Rumsfeld: They were working documents, basically. As a Con‐ gressman, if I’m not mistaken, there were something like 114 or 117 amendments to the 1964 civil rights legislation. When you’re doing that on something that’s that historic, and that important to the world and our country, and how our country appears in the world, I had to know why I voted on those 117 amendments. What were the argu‐ ments pro and con, and who said what about them? 29
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For example in the Ford White House the reason I took the notes was because I would go in to meet with President Ford, the only president who has never been elected to president or vice president, and he would unload on me with eight or 10 things he wanted done, and I had to make notes. And then I would give him 10 or 15 things that other people in the White House staff or the Cabinet wanted him to know. Then I would come out and dictate that. And half of those things would require somebody to do something. And then my assis‐ tant, Dick Cheney, would go and get somebody to do something about those things. But these were working documents; they were never corrected for typos, they were never corrected for spelling, but I had to do it because then I would go back into another meeting with President Ford and whoever he was meeting with as Chief of Staff, and I’d have to show my work.
The City: My favorite snowflake that I saw on your web site, on Rumsfeld.com, is a three sentence one sent to Doug Feith from I think Sep‐ tember 14th of 2001. You said to him, “When I meet with foreign leaders from now on, I would like to have some sense of what they or their govern‐ ments said about the attacks—whether they were supportive and offered assistance or not, so I can remember to thank them.” The next line is, “And if they didn’t, I’d like to remember that, too.”
Rumsfeld: (Laughs) It’s very much Rumsfeld. The City: Does that boil down sort of the essence of what you’re trying to achieve with these notes, just to remember who was on what side at what point?
Rumsfeld: Well partly. There were other notes of a kind. I remem‐ ber one I dictated was that, I think to Peter Rodman or Doug, I said “look, I am meeting people from different countries all day long and all week long. I want to know where they stand on the international criminal court.” I believe it was the Article 98 thing, where these countries that we were dealing with had an opportunity to exempt their country from certain aspects of the Rome treaty. It provided for people to be able to exempt themselves from it. And it made a differ‐ ence to the United States if we were going to send people on a hu‐ manitarian mission or something in their country. We ended up with over 98, I think, countries signing on to Article 98.
30
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Now, that doesn’t just happen. The reason that happens is because somebody from our country lets them know that we think it’s im‐ portant. And it’s important to remember why.
The City: You’ve done something very risky though in sharing all of this information, in the sense that, you know, the role of virtually every political biography or autobiography that I can think of going back, you know, as long as I can remember them is revision. It’s one of going back to these mo‐ ments in your life and sort of recrafting them from a different perspective. By putting all this out there you’re essentially saying, here is the original history, here is what it was and here is why, you know, I can make the ar‐ gument that I’m making. You have to have confidence in the decisions that you made that they were right and that they will be vindicated by history, don’t you? Rumsfeld: Oh, I don’t think so at all. The City: Really? Because that’s the conventional wisdom. Rumsfeld: No. It seems to me that what I want is the truth: what actually happened. And it may mean that I made a mistake. Or that someone else made a mistake, and that’s life. I think it’s helpful for people to get a sense of how decisions are made, the fact that the easy decisions are made below and when they get up to the senior level they’re tough decisions. There are arguments on both sides. You are going to inevitably be making decisions with imperfect information, with incomplete in‐ formation, and sometimes with inaccurate information. And that’s the way it is. And it’s useful for people to know that, it seems to me. I think that there was a narrative out there in the world as to what took place during the Bush years. And the narrative was written by people who weren’t there, and often bolstered by information from people who were two or three levels down and weren’t there. And I wanted to write what my slice of history, what I saw as actually hav‐ ing taken place. And I knew that because it was not consistent with the narrative that was out there that, to root the book in my docu‐ ments would give people a better context and perspective as to how they should consider the narrative that was out there and what I saw as my slice of history. 31
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The City: You’ve set a very challenging bar though. I mean, the next ma‐ jor book that has the potential to offer this sort of background and doesn’t, it kind of tells you something about the person involved and maybe what they want to achieve? Do you think that you’ve set sort of a new standard in terms of the twenty‐first century memoir? Rumsfeld: It’s been described that way by others—described as the “first political memoir of the information age.” I think someone com‐ pared it with Dean Atcheson’s Present at the Creation because of his documentation. That’s nice. But it does raise the bar. First of all there are hundreds of footnotes. There are 1,300 some endnotes. And there are over 3,500 documents on the Web site that people can go to and see that what I’ve said is rooted in documents, for the most part. The City: What do you think America’s role is in the world today and, what ought America’s role be in the world today?
Rumsfeld: Well, whatever it is it needs to be broadly agreed upon between government leadership and the people of the country. For it to be credible and sustainable, it has to have the support of the Amer‐ ican people. What’s happened several times in my lifetime is we’ve gone into a new environment. World War II was fought with the media basically, the Ernie Pyle’s of the world, writing from the standpoint of the mili‐ tary. And then presented in movie theaters in 15 minute clips of war films, but no television—radio, but in a very different way from to‐ day’s radio. And then of course you end up today in the information age and we’re fighting the first wars of the 21st century, the first wars of the information age. We’re fighting in an environment where there’s not only television, but there’s all of these instruments and means of communication. I mean, military people didn’t call home back in World War II or the Vietnam era. Now people are on the phone back and forth instan‐ taneously. They are transmitting e‐mails, and photos, and video clips of things that are going on all across the globe, and we need to adjust to that. We haven’t adjusted to that. And one of the reasons is that we have to grow up with it. We have to assimilate and get comfortable with that flood of information from so many different sources, and we aren’t comfortable with it yet. We’re getting there and the government hasn’t rearranged itself to 32
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think in terms of 24 hours a day communications. And have the skill sets to deal with the fact that a lie can race around the world 15 times while the truth is still getting his boots on, as I think Mark Twain or Samuel Clements said. So, it’s such a different era. And I think one of the reasons I put the documents out was be‐ cause I could. Other people in the past couldn’t. We didn’t have that ability to digitize large amounts of information, and because I was fortunate to spend four years doing it and take the time and invest‐ ment to do it. And because I really hoped and do hope that by doing it we’ve offered people who are serious students and interested in history and government and the important events of our times, an opportunity to have an insight and a perspective that hasn’t been available previously.
The City: Do you think that, when it comes to assessing sort of the les‐ sons that they should garner from that insight, from that information, we can learn some lessons as it applies to America’s role in helping the develop‐ ing world? We can obviously use technology to increase our awareness of these things, and people claim to have a more global mindset, although I think that’s a bit of a cliché. When it comes to the actual development of areas of the world that need it, what do you view as the appropriate aims of the United States and what we ought to be doing?
Rumsfeld: I supposed I’d say a couple of things. One is to be an example ourselves. In other words, to try to do the kinds of things that offer the greatest opportunity for the most people. And I think that that example is important in and of itself, quite apart from any‐ thing else we do. The fact that people line up in front of our embas‐ sies day after day, all around the world, trying to come here says something. They want an environment that’s more hospitable for obvious reasons—reasons obvious to me, at least. A second thing we could do is we can make the case for freedom. I’ve tried to do that by using that wonderful photograph of the Kore‐ an peninsula. I put it in the book—here are the same people north and south, and the same resources north and south, and in one case it’s the tenth or twelfth largest economy on the face of the earth in a piece of a peninsula in Asia. And above it are people starving and the only difference is that there’s a free political system and a free eco‐ nomic system south of the demilitarized zone in Korea and north of it is a communist dictatorship and a command economy. And it 33
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doesn’t work. And it’s harming people. And people are dying from starvation because of it. The third thing we can do is to do something that we don’t do at all, and that is to recognize the generosity of the American people. The American people are just enormously generous. And the money that we send, our people in this country, through international organ‐ izations, charitable organizations to help people in other lands is vastly greater than any other country on Earth. We don’t get any credit for it because no one talks about it, but I guess that’s the nature of the world.
The City: Beyond just sort of natural human generosity, what role do you think America’s military, if any, plays in these situations in terms of our footprint overseas?
Rumsfeld: One of the things we did at the Pentagon was to recog‐ nize that we were in a competition of ideas in the world. For whatev‐ er reason the Department of State and other parts of the government have not really stepped forward in the competition of ideas. And in realizing we were—there was an internal incident where in fashion‐ ing a national security policy, the Department of Defense encouraged the Department of State and the White House to step forward in pub‐ lic diplomacy. And there was resistance in the inner agency to that. And they wanted to take that section out. I don’t know quite why, but I’d have to look at the reasons, but it was illustrative of the problem. We’re sensitive about communicating. We’re afraid that we’ll be criticized for using federal taxpayer’s money to say things that are helpful to our country in terms of their impact overseas, but that are heard also in the United States, because there’s no wall that separates information. So, we just don’t do that very well.
The City: We also don’t explain it to our own American audience very well when it comes to these sorts of issues, it seems.
Rumsfeld: That’s right. The City: One of the challenges that, in American domestic politics, is happening right now, is this disagreement internally about defense spend‐ ing, about funding. And it seems like there’s not a very good message to the more populist the Tea Party folks, who are naturally inclined to make some very significant cuts. Others claim this is going to make America retreat from the world. Do you think that there’s a rationale behind what they want 34
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to do that’s good or do you think that right now we’re in a situation where people are just talking past each other, failing to discriminate between effi‐ ciency minded reductions and those that are riskier?
Rumsfeld: Oh, I don’t know. I’m not a good one to answer that. I’m not involved in politics really. I look at it, and I’m quite enthusiastic about the Tea Party movement because it gets people engaged in something that is important, in helping to direct the course of the country. And goodness knows the course of the country needs to be redirected. And thank goodness that there are more and more people who have the energy and the concern about the country that you see manifested in the Tea Party movement. Then you go to the question you posed. People have to take time and look seriously at how our federal spending is arranged. And it’s obviously totally out of control. We can’t afford to do what we’re do‐ ing to future generations. We’re going to damage our country and future generations if we keep trying to do what we’re doing. Now, you look at the federal budget and it’s pretty clear that as a percentage of GDP we’re spending at a relatively low level for de‐ fense. We’re down to 4% compared to 10% during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era and everything else has just exploded. Obviously there’s no big bureaucracy that doesn’t have waste in it. There are plenty of things that can be taken out of every major gov‐ ernment bureaucracy, including the Department of Defense. Every year as I recall the Congress shoved $10 billion down the Pentagon’s throat that we didn’t want for things that had nothing to do with our national security. On the other hand we’ve also made a series of mistakes in this country where we’ve overreacted on defense. After the end of the Cold War it was the end of history, and we could beat our weapons into plowshares. So there was this drawdown where we didn’t fund the things we needed, they just masked it. They simply didn’t invest in infrastructure, in our military infrastructure around the world, which you cannot do year after year, five, six, seven years. It’s like your house. You don’t have to paint it this year—let’s do it next year. If you worry about the roof, we’ll do that the following year and something else. And when you put that stuff off and it 35
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doesn’t show, it’s not like anyone is going to run a campaign against you for allowing infrastructure repairs to sit for a year. But on the other hand you end up after 10 years of that, and follow‐ ing the Cold War, and when George W. Bush arrived we had dam‐ aged our military and our intelligence capabilities. The result was that we needed to do some catch‐up. We’ve done that probably three times in my life, maybe four where we’ve made that decision as a society and then paid for it. The value of peace, and peace through strength, and deterrence has to be understood. Weakness is provocative. And to the extent you behave in a way that encourages people to take actions against you, you’ve made a terrible mistake as a country. We have to avoid that this time. I think people in our country generally understand that.
The City: Regarding bin Laden—you obviously ramped up capabilities in response to him. Do you feel vindicated by what happened?
Rumsfeld: I’ve been asked to write that, I haven’t written that. The City: What are some of the things, practically, at DOD, that you put into place which helped bring this about? Rumsfeld: I think really in terms of the special operations side of things, we did a great deal. We expanded the special operations budget several times, and the number of people by something just under fifty percent. We took some of the tier three things they were doing and passed them off to conventional forces, so they’d have more people available to do tier one and tier two, the tough stuff. And then we gave them additional authorities—they’ve never been a supported command, they’ve been a supporting command of some other command. We really focused on them, and each step was hard—because the services don’t like anything that’s special, because they think they’re special. There are certain things you can’t achieve without beefing up the intel—we always had the capability to capture and kill, but in the old days, we would’ve used a cruise missile and not known for sure. But this way, you could actually go in physically. We got the Marines involved for the first time and created a thing called MARSOC, the Marines special operations command, and the focus was intense on getting those capabilities right, and linked tightly with the Central Intelligence Agency. 36
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I think it was the 9‐11 Commission which recommended that DOD take over all covert action. I was asked about that, and I declined, because the combination of the CIA and the DOD together is a good thing, they’ve got different authorities, free cash where DOD’s got tighter restraints. I advised against transferring all that stuff over to DOD. Instead, George Tenet and I would have lunch every week and solve all the problems personally. It’s more direct that way.
The City: In the next few years, which is the more pressing region of con‐ cern for the United States—Asia or the Middle East? Rumsfeld: Well, the one thing we know is that there will be sur‐ prises. And I’ve written about that in the book and talked about it. The fact that no one from the Senate Confirmation Committee asked McNamara a single question about Vietnam, and no one asked Dick Cheney a single question about Iraq, and no one asked me a single question about Afghanistan in my confirmation hearings. Why? Be‐ cause things happen in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to know which part of the world is going to prove the more difficult. When somebody said to me, what do you worry about? I would say I worry about our intelligence capabilities and are we, do we have the right resources, human resources on the‐ se problems? Are we getting the best possible intelligence? Do we understand the risk of a failure of imagination as to what might hap‐ pen next? Now, why is that a big worry? Well, because this isn’t 1940 in terms of the lethality of weapons. It’s 2011 and the lethality of weapons have reduced dramatically our margin for error. And if one looks at the dark winter study by Johns Hopkins you could end up with smallpox being put into several locations in America and you end up with 1 million Americans dead. And not just that—that’s a horrible thing to contemplate—but imagine how we’d have to behave in terms of Marshall Law, and quarantines, and avoiding the spread. The margin for error for our country is modest. It’s not what it was when I was a young man. And therefore we have to do a considera‐ bly better job in our intelligence.
The City: You obviously have an incredible amount of examples from your experience of ways that you’ve impacted the world – in some incredible and unexpected ways sometimes. What’s some of the advice that you can 37
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give to young people who wish to emulate you in having that kind of im‐ pact? Who wish to achieve that kind of role in the world? How should they prepare themselves for the challenges they’ll face – what they read now, how they think, and how they order their lives?
Rumsfeld: People are different and their circumstances are differ‐ ent and I’ve been so fortunate, but I think that one thing I would say is read biography. Read history, and understand history, without the‐ ory that historians may want to inject into history. This is underap‐ preciated, I think. Second, do things you enjoy. If you enjoy something, you’ll work harder at it. You’ll do a better job at it. Do it with people who are smarter than you are. Do it with people who have been engaged in things you’ve not been engaged in, who have had experiences you haven’t had. And third, do things with people who have a sense of humor, be‐ cause if you’re going to work hard and do something important, you’re going to face long hours, and you’re more likely to handle them with better results if you’re doing what you’re doing with peo‐ ple who have a decent sense of humor.
Donald Rumsfeld served as the Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He was previously elected four times as a member of Congress from Illinois, and served as the United States Permanent Representative to NATO. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Rumsfeld is the author of Known and Unknown (Penguin, 2011). You can read an archive of his papers and documents related to his book and time in government at his website, Rumsfeld.com. Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y . 38
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CHRIST & CULTURE ]engaging0the0world} Paul D. Miller
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hristians are called neither to theocracy nor quietism. The Bible gives very little to those who want to read from it a fully articulated constitution and public policy agenda, and even less to those who try to wash their hands of all responsibility for the fate of the Almighty’s creation. It is not our vocation to run the world, nor our luxury to sit and watch it burn. Not that Christians haven’t argued both positions. Theocracy is a perennial temptation to the church. Rousas Rushdoony’s argument in favor of “theonomy” in The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and Greg Bahnsen’s in Theonomy and Christian Ethics (1977), influential among the American Christian Right, echoes a heresy with a distinguished lineage, one that ensnared Medieval Popes and Massachusetts Puri‐ tans alike. Because God is the rightful Sovereign, they argue, this present creation must be put into actual subjection to him and his law. Yet Christ said “My Kingdom is not of this world,” and clearly distinguished between two authorities when he commanded his dis‐ ciples to “Give to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s.” Withdrawal is also a temptation. John Howard Yoder argued in The Politics of Jesus (1972) against any kind of “realistic” compromise with the world. In his view, Jesus is a “model of radical political action,” where “radical” means “pacifist” and, general non‐conformity to the polities of this world. Stanley Hauerwas made a similar argument in The Peaceable Kingdom (1983) and Against the Nations (1985), among other works, and Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw recently updated the argument in Jesus for President (2008). The general stance shares inspiration with the likes of St. Benedict and Menno Simms. But nei‐ 39
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ther tradition—theocracy or withdrawal—has ever predominated in Christian thought, partly because the Bible must be stretched to give more than tepid support to either as a general posture. H. Richard Niebuhr famously catalogued five different stances in Christ and Culture (1956), the reigning paradigm for five decades, but did not argue (explicitly) in favor of any of them. With his silence he implied that any of the five stances might be acceptable for different Christians under different conditions. That may be so, but Niebuhr failed to develop the criteria by which to judge when different pos‐ tures were appropriate, leaving us with a map but no compass. Niebuhr’s silence illustrates a major difficulty for students of Chris‐ tianity and culture: if we are to move beyond theological generalities and apply Biblical wisdom to our present circumstances, we have to understand something about those circumstances, which is to say, something about the culture we live in. The question of the relation‐ ship God’s sacred people hold to profane culture is not only of theol‐ ogy, but of anthropology, sociology, even ethnography. The entire range of social sciences can be drawn into the discussion. A disa‐ greement over the relationship between Christianity and culture may stem from a theological disagreement, but also from an entirely secu‐ lar dispute about culture, cultural change, and cultural analysis. It is even more complex for students of that part of culture that le‐ gitimizes the exercise of power within it: politics. Christians in every age have found Biblical support for the regime they live under. The‐ ocracy, withdrawal, influence, antagonism, cooperation, and every other possible Christian attitude towards culture, politics, and the world have found advocates. Students of political theology may be tempted to despair and conclude, after millennia of debate, that the Bible’s politics are frankly ambiguous—maddeningly, frustratingly, even scandalously vague. Christians should seek something in be‐ tween theocracy and withdrawal, but that isn’t really saying much. Academia loves ambiguity: it gives them something to write about and presses something to publish. Thus, every year brings new titles on the subject of Christianity, culture, and politics from all sides of the spectrum. So in seeking answers to these questions, let us exam‐ ine several works which offer counsel on what guidance the Bible does give us, what guidance it does not, and how we can apply these lessons to the way we view Christ and the world. 40
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W
ayne Grudem’s contribution is called Politics According to the Bible (2010). Grudem is a Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary and the author of Systematic Theology (1994), a widely‐used text in Evangelical circles. The problem with Politics According to the Bible is that so much of it is not according to the Bible, but according to Wayne Grudem and his reading of history, economics, science, and “facts in the world,” as he puts it. He states up front in the introduction that he freely mixes arguments taken directly from Scripture with arguments from broader principles and observation. That being the case, his title is irresponsible. The book would be better titled “Politics According to Wayne Grudem”, and it is mostly a good example of how not to write on Christianity and politics. There is a good discussion of politics according to the Bible to be found amongst the first four chapters in which Grudem spells out a doctrine of the city of man. The first four chapters of Politics are thus, mostly, a welcome supplement to his earlier Systematic, although even in these chapters he shows a distressing tendency to cite the authority of the U.S. Declaration of Independence alongside of Scrip‐ ture. The absence of any serious discussion of civil government was an unaccountable omission and weakness to Systematic, so the contri‐ bution from Politics is welcome. Grudem begins by discussing and rejecting five paradigms of reli‐ gion and politics (including theocracy and withdrawal) before offer‐ ing his own preferred formulation: Christians should seek “signifi‐ cant Christian influence on government.” He outlines the Biblical basis for this view in Chapter 3, stepping systematically through the key Biblical texts like Genesis 9 and Romans 13. Here Grudem is at his best because he is on his own turf as Professor of Theology. He also has an excellent two‐page discussion of the question “Is the United States a Christian Nation?” in which he shows how the ques‐ tion can be interpreted and answered at least nine different ways. Unfortunately, he spends a mere three pages discussing the relation‐ ship between the church and Israel and why the Old Testament law is not a model for secular polities today, and a single paragraph to refute Rushdoony and Bahnsen. These ideas are at the root of many current confusions and errors regarding church‐state relations and deserve a fuller discussion than what Grudem gives. 41
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Throughout much of the text, Grudem’s arguments in these chap‐ ters are often shallow and one‐sided. In international relations and foreign policy, Grudem’s take is unfortunately weak—and while I appreciated his defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, Grudem does not raise the obvious moral questions surrounding secrecy, ly‐ ing, espionage, or covert action. While he devotes a separate section to the debate over torture, his discussion of Just War Theory is one page long. He has a long discussion of Israel and Palestine that does not do justice to the complexity of the situation and, while he rejects dispensationalism, he confusingly argues that God may still retain a measure of “providential favor” towards Jews. His discussion of “Is‐ lamic jihadism” is somewhat better. Yet in discussing the need for a strong military, Grudem offers an unqualified endorsement of deter‐ rence through superior firepower—a theory that works under certain conditions but not all, and is a fiercely debated subject by interna‐ tional relations scholars like Robert Jervis, Kenneth Walt, and John Mearsheimer. The book meanders for more than 400 pages on “specific issues.” Grudem has entire chapters on economics, the environment, national defense, and family issues. This would have been understandable from professionals in the field who have some background in policy analysis. Grudem does not. The result is on par with a lengthy news‐ paper opinion piece, a far cry from someone who claims to be argu‐ ing “according to the Bible.” Grudem is simply out of his depth.
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espite his book’s flaws, Grudem’s basic idea—that Christians should seek “significant influence” in public affairs—more or less captures the conventional wisdom among Christians on both the right and the left. Last year, for example, brought us The City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (2010) by Michael Ger‐ son and Peter Wehner from the right, and Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (2010) by Timothy Keller, from the left. Both books argue that Christians should engage in public affairs. Both argue that Christians should seek to promote justice, and that pursuit should be motivated specifically because of our identities and com‐ mitments as Christians. Best of all, the books are mostly compatible, though they have different emphases. Gerson and Wehner have written a surprisingly good book— surprising because they are both former White House staffers under President George W. Bush. Practitioners who leave office and write 42
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revisionist books typically write to vindicate their records, tomes of interest only to historians and the party faithful. This Gerson and Wehner have not done. The book is not a memoir, an apologia, or a defense of the Republican Party dressed up in religious language. Instead, they have written an essay reflecting on the state of religious engagement in politics in America. It is a slight work, short and free of academic pretensions, yet insightful and even moving at points. Gerson and Wehner start with five principles about religion and politics that are fairly basic but still often overlooked (since Niebuhr, it seems all writers on Christianity and culture have to organize their material in fives). Individuals’ moral duties differ from the state’s (the state can kill criminals, individuals cannot). They also differ from the church’s duties, a point often missed by the religious left and the mainline churches that cheapen their currency by issuing proclama‐ tions of judgment on virtually every public issue imaginable (a ten‐ dency which ironically coincided with the decline of the mainline in American life, but that is a matter for a different essay). Scripture is silent on most specific political issues, so political wisdom will look different in different societies, and the most political section of the Bible—ancient Israel’s law code—is broadly inapplicable for today. Starting from these basics, Gerson and Wehner develop a vision for religiously‐informed political engagement that recognizes the legiti‐ macy and goodness of the state and both the dangers and opportuni‐ ties for Christian involvement in the public sphere. Gerson and Wehner are proud veterans of the religious right and their work is partly a plea to their fellow conservative Christians not to give up on politics after a generation of seemingly fruitless struggle. They de‐ fend the meaningfulness and nobility of politics, invoking the aboli‐ tionist and civil rights movements as examples of what Christian political engagement can and should accomplish. But Gerson and Wehner also plea for Christians to expand their issues of concern beyond traditional family values and sexual mores—arguing Chris‐ tians should also care more about crime, the environment, jobs, and helping the poor. This is all well and good, but Gerson and Wehner sketch just the broadest outlines of what Christian thinking on these issues should start with when applied to public policy debates, which is unfortunate. Christian culture warriors often invoke the refrain that “politics is downstream from culture,” which amounts to a flippant dismissal of 43
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public service in favor of things of “real” importance, like writing novels and making movies. This is a simplistic and naïve view of the social organism. Neither politics nor society are a one‐way stream in which one wholly determines the other. They are more like a swirling whirlpool, a boiling cauldron, or a typhoon, in which everything is mixed with everything and affects everything. Montesquieu was a much better social theorist than Hegel. Gerson and Wehner get this exactly right. The state does affect cul‐ ture. Laws do not merely reflect social values; they reinforce and shape them too. Laws have an educative function; they reflect, and therefore teach, what society deems to be right and wrong. Bad wel‐ fare policy creates a culture of poverty and dependence. Bad mar‐ riage law encourages divorce. Bad tax policy incentivizes dishonesty and cheating. That means that Christians working in the public sphere are not just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—it means they can actually improve society, make a difference and help make the world a more just and peaceful place which reflects the character of God. Gerson and Wehner make shameful the resignation and fatal‐ ism which often marks Christian commentary on public affairs today.
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erson and Wehner share some common ground with Timo‐ thy Keller (who wrote the introduction to their book in addi‐ tion to his own separate volume). One of the major themes of Keller’s book is that Christians should care for the poor, something that Gerson and Wehner would agree with. Many have made this argument before, but Keller’s argument is mercifully free of Marxist, liberationist, or postmillennial trappings. He makes a straightfor‐ ward argument from Scripture demonstrating the overwhelming concern for the “widow, the orphan, immigrants, and the poor” throughout the Old and New Testaments. The cumulative weight of Scripture he quotes in the first three chapters is impressive and prac‐ tically makes the argument for him, and his theological orthodoxy should help convince conservatives who are traditionally wary of this argument because of the political or theological liberalism of those who typically make it. Keller frames his argument squarely in orthodox theological terms: we should help the poor to respect the image of God found in them; because God cares for the poor; and out of overflowing gratitude for having received the free gift of God’s grace through Christ. But Keller smuggles in a second theme that is much more complex and far‐ 44
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reaching than his simple plea to care for the poor. Keller claims that caring for the poor is the essential definition of “justice.” Throughout the book he refers to anti‐poverty efforts not as charity, but as justice:
The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups [the widow, the orphan, immigrants, and the poor]. Any neglect shown to the needs of the members of this quartet is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity, but a violation of justice, of mishpat. God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to ‘do justice.’ Keller’s argument about the nature of justice makes Generous Justice a book of political philosophy and political theology masquerading as a tract on poverty. This raises a much bigger and more complex question than what particular causes Christians should advocate in the public sphere—it raises the question of whether and how Chris‐ tians should do political advocacy at all. Keller asks how Christians can advocate in a democratic public sphere populated by many non‐Christians. How do we make argu‐ ments that are persuasive to those who do not share our fundamental theological commitments? If we cannot, do we cede the public sphere to those who can? Keller’s answer is that we should recognize and affirm what is good in the various worldly conceptions of justice, and frame our arguments in common terms when possible. He outlines three currently prominent theories of justice—the libertarian, utilitar‐ ian, and communitarian. But we should also always insist that these worldly understandings are incomplete and flawed. All three find parallels in the Bible, but the Bible’s conception of justice is rooted ultimately in the character of God. God cares for individuals (the ground of rights and liberty), for the common good (the ground of utility), and for right relationships (the ground of community). God’s justice is cosmic and universal, compared to the relatively provincial and narrow views of justice of our secular philosophers. Keller ar‐ gues that all three secular views of justice should lead us, in different ways, to care for the poor, but ultimately only a Biblical understand‐ ing gives us the full picture and proper motivation to do so.
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he full ramification of Keller’s argument is the conclusion that no “neutral” way to advocate for justice in the public sphere exists. Christians can only think about justice in Christian 45
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terms. Speaking for justice and doing justice, Biblically understood, are innately Christian acts that reflect and promote Christian ways of thinking. The unavailability of a neutral position, a view of justice that does not require religious commitments or a view of “the good,” means that the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls is impracticable. We cannot do politics denuded of our religious selves. Man is a social and political animal, but he is also a spiritual one; to ignore the spirit when acting in the city is to require schizo‐ phrenia, damage our souls, and endanger our cities. Keller believes the absence of neutrality should not stop Christians from advocating their position in the public sphere. We should seek common ground, framing our arguments in ways that appeal to non‐ Christians, but at heart we should recognize that our beliefs about justice are uniquely and specifically Christian. If there is no religious‐ ly‐neutral way to do politics, then we should be unapologetic about pursuing an explicitly Christian political and cultural agenda. Here Keller is joined by a generation of thinkers, grass‐roots organ‐ izers, and earnest young Christians who have pledged their profes‐ sional lives to “transforming the culture” or “redeeming the culture” or “taking back the country for Christ.” This view is not limited to, or even original with, the Christian Right. The old mainline establish‐ ment pursued much of its social justice agenda under a transforma‐ tionalist vision. Niehbuhr is sometimes read as having tacitly en‐ dorsed the “Christ transforming culture” viewpoint because of the arrangement of Christ and Culture. His five views build on each oth‐ er in a dialectic, each view surpassing and improving on the previous one until they culminate in the transformationalist view. The logical conclusion of this transformationalist paradigm is the resurrection of Christendom. Transformationalists want to revive the world in which Christianity served as the public philosophy for the city of man. Christian ethics and a Christian worldview should in‐ form and legitimize not only laws, but mores, social standards of conduct, and aesthetic creations.
I
f Christians decided it was their mission to rebuild Christendom, they could do worse than to read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling (2008). Crouch articulates a strong and persuasive understanding of the cultural mandate of Scripture with far reaching and inspiring implications for Christians’ role in the world. We are all called to exercise dominion over the 46
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earth, to fill the earth and subdue it, to work and tend the garden of creation (“to dress it and to keep it” in the King James idiom). This is a noble and holy calling—indeed, “culture is God’s original plan for humanity.” Crouch is optimistic about the eternal fate of our cultural creations, suggesting that the best of them will be among the “glory and honor of the nations” that the “kings of the earth” bring to God as an offering in the new creation. The best of human culture be‐ comes “the furniture of heaven.” When I was in college and first attended a live concert of Beetho‐ ven’s Ninth Symphony, I was so enraptured that I literally could not imagine a heaven that did not include the Ninth as part of paradise. (Later, in a more sober moment, I reflected that probably said more about the limits of my imagination than God’s paradise). It is easy to see how an eschatological destiny for our earthly work would give us extra incentive to work hard. Who wouldn’t want to craft a painting so powerful that it adorned the walls of your future heavenly home? Sadly, Biblical support for this idea is contested, to say the least, and Crouch does not engage with its critics. Because of Crouch’s high view of the cultural mandate, he seems to be endorsing the transfor‐ mationalist view for most of the book. The Kingdom is present now in the church and the hearts of believers, so it would follow that we should go about the business of transforming the world. And this is, in fact, the very purpose of our lives. “Transformed culture is at the heart of God’s mission in the world, and it is the call of God’s re‐ deemed people.” And this is our destiny in the new heavens and the new earth. “Our eternal life in God’s recreated world will be the ful‐ fillment of what God originally asked us to do: cultivating and creat‐ ing in full and lasting relationship with our Creator.” Yet Crouch ultimately, if narrowly, rejects the transformationalist agenda, not entirely convincingly. Christ can and will transform cul‐ tures, but that does not mean his followers are called to do so. The temptation “to take over God’s role as the transformer of culture leads to folly” Crouch writes, rejecting the possibility of a renewed Christendom because efforts to “fully ‘enculturate’” the gospel are “always purchased at the price of a reduced gospel.” Our own ability to “change the world” is severely limited because the world makes us more than we make it. We simply cannot predict which cultural arti‐ facts will have a lasting influence. We don’t control culture; we only 47
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contribute to it. And trying to “change the world” is more often than not a sign of hubris and arrogance than piety. But Crouch raises an important question. Is the effort to build a Christian society a good thing? If Christians work in all sincerity to transform culture and politics, where do they stop? Under the guise of transformation Christians might get involved in fairly uncontro‐ versial causes, like writing a Christian‐themed novel, giving to chari‐ ty, or registering voters. But Christians have often gone much further, trying to influence laws, run for office, legislate Christian morality, or, at the furthest extreme, simply institute a Christian common‐ wealth. This is why secularists fear Christian political involvement and why many criticize the transformationalist agenda: they see no purely logical reason, once we admit the legitimacy of religiously‐ based arguments in the public sphere, not to simply hand over pow‐ er to the clergy, with pastors and priests running the world. A friend of mine recently wondered aloud what the difference was between Christian transformationalists and Islamists who want to impose an Islamic society. Seeking “significant influence” is indistinguishable from trying to take over. Secularists find this chain of reasoning frighteningly powerful. How do we avoid this conclusion? How do we salvage some role for Christians in the public sphere without go‐ ing all the way down this road? Where is the firebreak between “sig‐ nificant influence” and theocracy?
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he firebreak is the doctrine of the two kingdoms and natural law, according to David VanDrunen. They constitute the neu‐ tral ground on which Christians and non‐Christians can live under a common, non‐theocratic civil government. VanDrunen has made a major contribution to the discussion of Christianity, culture, and politics. He published Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (2009), which recounts the development of Reformed and broader Protestant thought about culture and politics. He expressly intends this historical volume to be a preface to Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christi‐ anity and Culture (2010), VanDrunen’s own contribution to the ongo‐ ing conversation. VanDrunen, a trained lawyer, is one of the clearest and most orga‐ nized theological authors writing today. His concern in the historical volume is twofold. First, he aims to rescue the doctrine of the two kingdoms from critics who, in his view, misunderstand it as quiet‐ 48
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ism. Second, he seeks to show that contemporary Calvinism’s insist‐ ence on the transformationalist agenda is a departure from historical Calvinism. For example, in the foreword to Gerson and Wehner’s book, Keller wrote “the Lutherans followed a two‐kingdom approach to Christ and culture, in which Christians are not to bring their faith into politics, while Reformed Christianity has been characterized by a view that Christians are supposed to transform culture.” If VanDrunen is right—and his volume is exhaustively footnoted with meticulous research—this sentence is riddled with historical error and represents exactly the misconceptions he aims to correct. Early Calvinists also propounded a two kingdoms approach, and neither they nor the Lutherans used it as a simplistic formula for keeping religion out of politics. Only in the last century have Calvinists reject‐ ed their heritage in favor of the transformationalist view. In Living in God’s Two Kingdoms VanDrunen seeks to build on this heritage and spell out his argument for how Christians can remain involved in the world of politics and culture without succumbing to the transformationalist or theocratic temptations. God governs all creation and all people, Christians and non‐Christians, but he does so through two separate covenants and two separate institutions. God rules the common kingdom, in which believers and unbelievers live side by side, through the sword‐wielding civil government. God rules the redemptive kingdom, through which Christians are saved and sanctified, through the church. In this, VanDrunen is directly following Martin Luther, who wrote in Secular Authority in 1523 that “God has ordained the two governments; the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people, and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they must needs keep the peace outwardly, even against their wills.” The purpose of the common kingdom is a modest one: to sustain order. And because Christians and non‐Christians have a common interest in achieving the humble aims of the common kingdom, there is no need for a Christian commonwealth. Christians and non‐ Christians can agree on basic rules for corporate living because of God’s gift of the natural law. “God had inscribed his moral law on the heart of every person, such that through the testimony of conscience all human beings have knowledge of their basic moral obligations and, in particular, have a universally accessible standard for the de‐ velopment of civil law.” Natural law does not tell us how to worship 49
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the true God, and the commonwealth should not attempt to achieve much beyond its minimalist mandate. It should not try to shape souls, promote right worship, or teach theology: to do so would be to confuse the state with the church. VanDrunen is at pains to distinguish the two kingdoms from Au‐ gustine’s two cities. Augustine’s two cities are implacably opposed eschatological realities between whom there is no overlap. The City of Man is the collection of all unbelievers throughout time destined for hell; the City of God is the collection of all true believers. Augus‐ tine hints at a two kingdoms approach when he acknowledges that, in this world, we cannot always tell who is in which kingdom. The visible church contains unbelievers. But the state always exists for Augustine under a cloud of suspicion. “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but great robberies?” he famously asked. What held a pagan polity like Rome together was not justice but a common love— a love of glory, conquest, and riches. For VanDrunen, government is not evil or even under suspicion. It is God’s chosen instrument—his gift, in fact—to keep order within the common kingdom. Christians should readily and joyfully support and even participate in the life of the common kingdom, including by paying taxes, voting, or serving in the police forces or other public office.
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his is an appealing vision of a worldly polity that Christians can support without trying to make it into a Christian nation. But what of the Bible’s mandate to Christians to engage in God‐glorifying cultural labor and work for political justice? Per Crouch, Keller, and others, doesn’t the mandate imply a uniquely Christian and decidedly non‐neutral political and cultural mission in the world? VanDrunen has some key differences here with Crouch. For Crouch and the transformationalists, the cultural mandate is a present and enduring reality and the major reason we should pursue cultural excellence in the present creation. For VanDrunen, the cul‐ tural mandate was a unique test given to Adam, who failed to fulfill it. The command to tend and keep the garden was a test, success at which would have immediately inaugurated the new creation. God instituted a lesser version of the mandate with Noah in Genesis 9, including only the commands to “be fruitful and multiply” and to exercise dominion. The full mandate, including the command to “tend and keep” the garden, lapsed upon Adam’s failure. Christ, through his life and work, succeeded where Adam failed; he alone 50
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enacted mankind’s original cultural calling through his obedience, and thus he achieved the new creation. VanDrunen’s argument rests on a curious reading of Genesis 1‐2 and Hebrews 2 that is not entirely clear, and should have been explained at greater length given the importance it plays in his argument. VanDrunen’s approach has deeper difficulties. He is right that “the requirements of the law are written on [Gentiles’] hearts” as Paul writes in Romans 2:14, a key Biblical support for the idea of natural law. But Romans 2 says the existence of natural law ensures unbe‐ lievers are without excuse before God for their sins—Paul’s point is soteriological, not political. Yes, natural law exists—but can it really provide a neutral basis for common civil life between believers and un‐believers, one that allows Christians to work for justice without subtly Christianizing the polity? It is true that God held the pagan nations of the Old Testament ac‐ countable for their sins and expected righteousness of them, from Sodom to Babylon, and that this expectation was rooted in something other, and more general, than the specific revelation he gave to Israel. But that does not mean God expected those nations to use natural law as a basis for a common civil life shared between believers and non‐believers. Those nations were not religiously pluralistic, com‐ prising both God’s people and pagans together in one community. God does not judge Babylon for failing to provide a common basis for Jews and Babylonians to live together, but for committing ram‐ pant and gross injustice and oppression against everyone. Establish‐ ing common ground between believers and non‐believers in one civil polity simply was not a challenge anyone faced in the pre‐modern, Old Testament world. The prophets’ denunciations of the pagan na‐ tions thus are of limited use for thinking about how Christians should live in the world today. Civil law requires basic agreement about right and wrong—a common love, Augustine would say. The existence of natural law has not enabled mankind to agree on its content, at least not one that endures for more than a few generations, much less so in our increas‐ ingly pluralistic societies. God’s moral law remains imprinted on us, but the Fall corrupted mankind’s ability to recognize it clearly. That is why Christians are almost the only people today who actually be‐ lieve in natural law and try to make public arguments based on it. Postmodernism has taught everyone else that there are no objective 51
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standards of morality. Natural law is just another word for Christian morality: they come from the same God, who holds everyone to the same perfect standard of holiness.
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anDrunen is unrealistic to expect that natural law could be taken seriously as a neutral tool acceptable to both Christians and non‐Christians. Much of the secular left expressly seeks to reestablish society on new values of its own design and thus re‐ jects anything that rests on nature, tradition, the sacred, or authority. There mere act of articulating a belief or advancing a truth‐claim on grounds of a supposedly natural law is taken as oppressive and theo‐ cratic in some circles. VanDrunen wants natural law to be the anti‐ dote to the transformationalist agenda, but natural law itself would radically transform any polity into which it is introduced. Indeed, VanDrunen underestimates the impact a truly natural law‐based ap‐ proach to politics would have on our world. As Keller argued, public arguments today are cast almost exclu‐ sively in terms of secular theories of justice—libertarian, utilitarian, or communitarian. The latter two are explicitly relativistic: justice depends on the definition of “utility,” or the values of the communi‐ ty. Nazis could invoke utilitarianism and communitarianism just as well as democrats. Most public policy debates in the United States take place almost entirely in terms of economics—that is, in terms of utility. The true natural law—that is, God’s moral law rightly under‐ stood—would undermine such claims and profoundly alter the modern political landscape. We can see both the transformative impact and the limits of natural law at work in particular on the policy debate over human rights. When someone invokes human rights, they are making a claim about justice: human beings have certain claims against the state, that these claims are universal, absolute, and objectively binding, and that these claims are “self‐evident,” e.g., they inhere in the simple fact of hu‐ man existence. The structural features of human rights—their univer‐ sality, absoluteness and self‐evidence—demonstrate that they are a species of natural law reasoning. Gerson and Wehner, for example, explicitly invoke natural law when they argue that human rights should be at the center of American foreign policy. Three things about human rights illustrate the problem with VanDrunen’s hope for natural law. First, human rights have trans‐ formed the world. Arguably no other concept in history has so com‐ 52
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pletely changed the social, cultural, political, and economic condi‐ tions in which human beings live. Second, the idea came directly from Christianity—according to scholars like Brian Tierney and John Witte. Human rights are not neutral. Third, human rights have only been partially successful as a common public philosophy on which believers and non‐believers alike can agree. There is no universal consensus on what human rights actually are, nor will there ever be in this fallen world. While their adoption has been transformative, human rights create just as many disputes as they solve because fall‐ en people seize upon them as weapons in their political maneuver‐ ing. VanDrunen’s hope that natural law can be common, neutral, and restrain Christians who want to transform the world doesn’t take the full implications of natural law seriously enough.
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f Keller is right and VanDrunen is wrong, if there is no neutral public philosophy to which Christians and non‐Christians can alike agree, if Christian social, cultural, and political engagement must necessarily involve Christian presuppositions, a Christian worldview, and a Christian understanding of justice, if natural law really is just a thinly‐disguised cipher for Christianity—if so, how do Christians do politics or cultural engagement without becoming the‐ ocrats? James Davison Hunter answers this question by arguing that Christians must adopt a stance of “faithful presence” in his remarka‐ ble book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (2010). Hunter’s book is a rarity: an academic tome that is fairly accessible to a non‐academic reader, it tackles large, important questions, and offers a genuinely refreshing and provoking answer. It is also a book deeply threatening to those whose life and work are invested on either side of the culture wars. Hunter begins by outlining the basic assumption of Christian polit‐ ical engagement in recent decades. Christians have assumed that political change will flow from personal evangelism: change one heart at a time, win over enough hearts among the masses, and civi‐ lization will follow, sooner or later. This assumption is wrong, ac‐ cording to Hunter. Culture and politics are not the creations of com‐ mon individuals or the masses: they are the creations of elites who work in major culture‐producing institutions, like universities, film studios, or the U.S. Congress. He claims the major part of Christian political and cultural efforts since the 1960s has been shallow, naïve, and ineffective, outlining in chapter after chapter how activism from 53
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the Christian Right, the Christian Left, and the Anabaptist pacifists have been informed by resentment, captured by worldly agendas, and guided by a superficial grasp of social realities. Critiques of Christian activism are plentiful, but Hunter is writing from within the Christian community, and that makes all the differ‐ ence. He offers a sympathetic, constructive, almost yearning assess‐ ment, wanting to salvage the Christian witness from the disrepute he believes has come with the activism of recent generations. He tries, in the last third of the book, to outline what a positive Christian stance towards the world should look like today. He approaches it from a curious direction. Instead of asking directly, “How should Christians engage the world?” he observes that Christians have done much damage to themselves by trying to engage and instead asks, “how can I be a Christian, given today’s cultural and political realities?” His starting point is that meaningful beliefs require a supportive social context. “The very plausibility and persuasiveness of the Chris‐ tian faith depend on a cultural context in which meaning, purpose, beauty, and belonging are possible. The viability of the Christian faith and the possibility of sharing the faith depend on a social environ‐ ment in which faith—any faith—is plausible.” Evangelicals may be suspicious of the vaguely materialist undertones here and insist, on theological grounds, that God does not require a cooperative culture to save us. True, but God also formed the church and commanded us not to give up gathering together because he made us to be social animals. A social environment in which “meaning, purpose, beauty, and belonging” make sense is surely one of the means God has or‐ dained to bring us to faith in him. We do not live in such a culture today. Christianity faces a crisis be‐ cause the supportive social context for belief has evaporated. Hunter argues that “changes in the social organization of modern life chal‐ lenge Christian faith to the core,” specifically the rise of “difference” and “dissolution,” in the increase of cultural and religious pluralism and the adoption of postmodernism as the quasi‐official ideology of pluralist societies. These challenges “undercut the capacity to be‐ lieve,” and weaken the “plausibility structures that make belief cred‐ ible.” To put it crudely, how can I be a serious Christian if there are no serious Christians around to teach me and if the culture tells me there is no truth? In response to this challenge, Christians have tried to take over, defend against, remain pure from, or accommodate to 54
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the culture, all to no avail. Christian faith requires healthy cultural soil to grow in, but we seem hopelessly exposed to the barren, poi‐ sonous ground around us. Where do we find the good soil?
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he answer is for the church to constitute such a culture, and here is where Hunter reengages with the question of how Christians should approach cultural and political life. He pre‐ scribes a posture of “faithful presence” in the world, which is both an answer to how Christianity is possible in the modern world and a theology of engagement with the world. “A theology of faithful pres‐ ence calls Christians to enact the shalom of God in the circumstances in which God has placed them and to actively seek it on behalf of others…in all tasks they undertake, in all vocations.” Christians should be the center and model for what is good, true, and beautiful in the world. In so doing they both encourage and build one another up and become a winsome and attractive example for non‐Christians. This is not a call to create an isolated Christian ghetto, but to be faithfully present to the world and to our tasks through active, life‐ giving and self‐sacrificing love. When the church acts this way, “when a vision for the renewal of all things is embodied in the church,” then Christians will mature and naturally live out their faith in all their lives, including their vocations and their cultural and po‐ litical tasks. This is part of God’s design. Christians “are saved in or‐ der to resume the tasks mandated at creation, the task of caring for and cultivating a world that honors God and reflects his character and glory,” Hunter says, in agreement with Crouch and disagree‐ ment with VanDrunen. Such God‐glorifying labor “is an embodiment of the values of the coming kingdom and is, thus, a foretaste of the coming kingdom,” and “a contribution not only to the God of the Christian community but to the flourishing of all.” Hunter’s vision of faithful presence would have a tremendous po‐ litical and cultural impact on the world around us—but only if we don’t mean it to. In other words, the motivating impulse of a posture of faithful presence is not to save, transform, take over, or flee from the world. Once we try to orchestrate broad social change or plan the effects of our love, it is no longer love but a program. Faithful pres‐ ence is not a program; the purpose is not to have any particular or lasting impact on secular politics or culture, but simply to love one another—to love Christians in fellowship and non‐Christians in 55
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evangelism—to love one another in concrete, embodied, social ways, by affirming God’s creation and critiquing the effects of sin upon it. For Hunter’s vision to happen, there must be a much broader and more intense effort at the formation and growth of Christian identi‐ ty—theologically, a much broader understanding of, and more delib‐ erate effort at, sanctification. Too often, he believes, churches focus on saving souls only to neglect their nurture and growth afterwards. For Hunter, maturation in the faith does not occur automatically, nor is it a mere exercise in rote catechism. For Hunter, “formation is a about learning to live the alternative reality of the kingdom of God within the present world order faithfully.” Teaching theology is the first step in such formation, but far from the last. Growth must include teach‐ ing Christians how to adopt this posture of faithful presence. Hunter’s book is weakened, though, by vagueness on key points. His “faithful presence” is highly abstract, and it isn’t entirely clear what he means. Perhaps he felt a list of specific actions would have been out of place, but without one, his vision is much less accessible. Hunter is also unclear on the role of the institutional church as com‐ pared with individual Christians. He sometimes speaks of what “the church” should do, but it is unclear if he means the local, visible con‐ gregation or if he simply means Christians in the aggregate. He im‐ plies the local, institutional church should be at the center of this new “formation,” but his expectations for vocational training, community organizing, expansive mercy ministries, volunteerism for a broad array of causes, seminars for business leaders and more are likely more than what most local churches can provide. Hunter’s worst error in the book, however, comes just pages from the end. He argues that to recover the Christian witness, Christians should be “silent for a season” on political matters: essentially, we should shut up for a while to restore the credibility of our voice. In a book arguing that we need to be “faithfully present” to our neighbors and our world, Hunter unaccountably asserts that, in politics, we must be absent. His recommendation is alarming, disappointing, and wrong: just because some Christians are loud and uncouth in politics does not mean all Christians should shut up. To do so would be to tacitly admit that the loudmouths really do represent us. If anything, mature and tactful Christians have an even greater re‐ sponsibility to remain politically active to prevent the Christian wit‐ ness from being monopolized by the loudmouths. Additionally, 56
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Scripture gives us little reason to believe that Christians are allowed to simply abandon whole fields of human activity. Historically, the periods of Christian political disengagement have been precisely when injustice has grown the fastest. Hunter only gives a single par‐ agraph to this idea, but it is jarring coming at the end of an otherwise powerful and sophisticated work. Gerson and Wehner, whose de‐ fense of Christian political activity is so moving and powerful, would surely be aghast at Hunter’s suggestion.
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hristians can, should, and will continue to be active in politi‐ cal and cultural activity. Few Christians want to take over the world or run it like theocrats. They do want to exert “signifi‐ cant influence” over the world around us: not out of a will to power, but out of love. Gerson and Wehner’s plea for human rights and Kel‐ ler’s call for justice for the poor are both acts of love, as is Crouch’s suggestion that we cultivate and create what is good and true and beautiful in this world. VanDrunen has given us a strong and helpful corrective against theocratic or transformationalist temptations, and Hunter has gone further in suggesting how we should simply live faithfully in a world that is not our home. Yet none of that should stop us from pursuing our calling as Chris‐ tians to work for truth, goodness, beauty, and justice in this world. That pursuit will help create a world that reflects God’s glory and, thus, gives our evangelism something concrete and embodied to latch on to. We build examples of justice in this world so that we can point to them and tell our non‐Christian friends about the Author of true justice. We create something good in the world and then say to our friends, “Look, this is what we mean when we talk about God’s righteousness. This work is just a pale reflection and an imitation of what I yearn for, of what God has promised, when Jesus comes.” In this task we can be honest about our faith, about our limits and our calling, and in so doing, fulfill our duty as faithful servants.
Paul D. Miller is assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University. Previously, he served as director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff and a political analyst in the U.S. intelligence community. 57
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LEARNING FROM
T OC QUEVILLE ,on0the0french< Peter Augustine Lawler
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ne day, in the midst of bored browsing in the Harvard Bookstore, I opened a book of interviews with Walker Percy to this sentence: “Alexis de Tocqueville—an amazing fellow—said it 150 years ago: All the Ameri‐ cans I know are Cartesians without having read a word of Tocqueville.”
What a fascinating French observation about our country. Tocque‐ ville, the French author of the best book on America, had as Percy notes identified Americans as a variety of “pop Cartesians.” They embraced Descartes’ principle of radical doubt not through reading, but through being democrats. The democrat refuses to be ruled by oth‐ er persons, and he does so by doubting or refusing to privilege any and all claims for personal authority. But the American democrat, like Descartes himself, doesn’t question, as Percy explains, the impersonal authority of science; “an educated American believes that everything can be explained ‘scientifically,’” according to the materialistic prin‐ ciples of cause and effect. But he, again like Descartes, exempts him‐ self from such explanations. The “I,” as Percy learned from the French Catholic Jacques Maritain, becomes a kind of ghost in a ma‐ chine, an increasingly mysterious and isolated leftover from the world modern science can otherwise explain so well. Problems ensue. Left “without any coherent theory of man,” mod‐ ern human beings, Tocqueville and Percy agree, are “deranged.” Madness, as Tocqueville observes, is commoner in America than an‐ ywhere else, as happiness is surprisingly fleeting and rare for a free and powerful people living in a most fortunate environment. 58
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Tocqueville thought that the French Catholic Blaise Pascal taught the truth—if not the whole truth—about who we are. Whether or not the claims of Christian revelation are actually true, Tocqueville con‐ cluded, Pascal was right that Christianity—the Christian view of who we are—knows man. But Pascal is not good enough; he knows our greatness and our misery, but he makes each of us too solitary in this world. He trivializes the joys we experience in knowing with and being with others like ourselves. So Tocqueville and the best American Thomist, Walker Percy, agree that we Americans, need Pascal to understand that our legendary pursuit of happiness is mostly a diversion. Our restless pursuits, as Tocqueville says, are feverish or symptoms of our disorder. We’re quite literally deranged—we don’t even seem to have the words to tell the truth about who are and why we do what we do.
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e certainly can’t explain our strange and wonderful hu‐ man behavior with our Lockean and Cartesian theory. Just beneath the pragmatic happy talk of our pop Cartesian experts, Tocqueville and Percy hear the howl of existentialism— which is really, as Pascal explains, an expression of the misery of man without God. Tocqueville and Percy also follow Pascal in not confus‐ ing restlessness with hopelessness. They see in the restlessness of the Americans reason for a glimmer—or maybe much more than a glimmer—of hope for the future of humans worthy liberty, for a fu‐ ture worthy of beings with souls. It’s Pascal, as Percy reminds us, “who says to be born, to live, is to be dislocated,” and we can be more at home with our homelessness if we understand it as a clue to our true dignity, origin, and destiny. That means, Percy explains, that he finally owed less to Southern Stoicism and even to Faulkner and American writers in general than to certain French writers from Sar‐ tre through Camus and Gabriel Marcel all the way back to Pascal. What these French writers shared is a psychological approach based on taking our homelessness for what it is and not as a disease that might have some rational or ethical or cultural or scientific cure. Tocqueville, everyone knows, wrote on the Americans for the bene‐ fit of the French, by showing the French the Americans are both bet‐ ter and worse than they are. In our time, there are various ways Americans relate to French thought. The first, characteristic of many conservatives, is to proudly proclaim that we don’t need no bleepin’ foreign aid. These conservatives aim to persuade us that America had 59
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a flawless Founding and was later messed up by the German influ‐ ence on the Progressive Era and the French envy of the Obama Era. The flaw in this account of our founding innocence of all things French or German, to begin with, is that our philosopher Locke was basically a Cartesian, and Descartes was French. Our founding intel‐ lectual, Mr. Jefferson, knew well of the Lockean‐Cartesian materialis‐ tic connection, and he was progressively more open to every French revolutionary innovation it generated in both theory and practice. Another and more important flaw is that Tocqueville really does un‐ derstand us better than we understand ourselves, showing us that our pragmatism and progressivism aren’t really so much alien intru‐ sions but indigenous expressions of the American democratic mind. The Americans didn’t need to read Descartes to be Cartesians. By priding themselves in their methodical doubt of every form of per‐ sonal authority, they inevitably defer instead in a much more degrad‐ ing way to impersonal forces such as public opinion. Consider the number of experts who replace “I think” with “studies show.” The proud American begins with the thought that “nobody’s better than me,” but soon enough is humbled by the corresponding democratic thought that “I’m no better than anyone else.” And that humility overwhelms the pride, causing the “I” to have no resources to distin‐ guish itself from some homogeneous mass. The impersonal idea that the point of my being is to serve Historical progress didn’t sneak in here from Hegelian Germany. It’s present, Tocqueville shows, in the intrinsically democratic idea of the indefinitely perfectibility of man. A second American way of relating to French thought these days, characteristic of many liberals, really is French envy. “We need to get less Puritanical and more French!” by which liberals mean we must stop being sexually repressed gun‐toting workaholic religious nuts. We have to transform our brutal form of capitalism through the adoption of the benevolent institutions of French social democracy. Then we’ll be able to enjoy the near oxymoron of the French work ethic and spend endless hours drinking fancy coffee in squares graced by cathedrals built by faith that no sensible personal has an‐ ymore. These Americans seem to want to be so at home with their homelessness that they no longer long for any true home. America, as Chesterton—an English Catholic Thomist who liked the French and even the French revolution—said, has always been a home for the homeless, and one meaning of many of that observation is that Amer‐ 60
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ican has been a home for those at home with their homelessness in this world. There‘s also a less common kind of French envy: It’s found among certain very admirable American traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are shaped in some measure by the “after virtue” philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. These traditional Francophiles observe that only the most individualistic currents of European thought, begin‐ ning with the Protestant dissenter Puritans, got to America in the first place. So from the very beginning America lacked what it takes to have genuine political or spiritual community, morphing into being the most imperial of the modern nation‐states—out to dominate the world with our capitalism and our wasteland of a culture. Lately we’ve been unjustly invading countries to protect our oil and making everyone become democratic individualists just like us. For these traditionalists, there’s little to no hope for America. But Christendom—the way of life that existed in the Europe prior to the nation‐state—might rise from the ruins of Europe. The nation must wither away, as MacIntyre teaches, to be replaced by a Christian polis or even by the Christian politics of love. For these medieval Franco‐ philes, it takes something like a medieval village to restore living in light of who we really are against all the modern forms of imperson‐ al, ideological domination.
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here are some curious convergences in the trendy left and seemingly traditionalist forms of French envy. They begin with exaggerations—really, caricatures—of American individ‐ ualism as it exists now. Most telling is the willful ignorance of the enduring wisdom of Tocqueville. Europe today, much more than it was in Tocqueville’s day, is generally much more individualistic than America. Individualism according to Tocqueville is a kind of heart disease, an emotional withdrawal into the confines of one’s own pu‐ ny self, based on the mistaken judgment that both love and hate are more trouble than they’re worth. Today Europe is making two fundamental errors: It’s abolishing the nation and denying that all particular nations exist under the univer‐ sal church. Today’s Europe is in the thrall, the emphatically French Catholic Pierre Manent explained, of a kind of post political, post familial, and post religious fantasy. People have so withdrawn into themselves that they aren’t even making enough babies to secure their political future. They hate their bodies, Manent claimed, in part 61
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because they’ve become so sure that they’re nothing more than bod‐ ies. Because familial, political, and spiritual surroundings seem un‐ familiar, people are increasingly divorced from a sense of home. We Americans can also learn much from this circumstance about the excesses of our individualism, about our inability to keep Locke in the lockbox, about the horror that is Roe v. Wade, the mean womyn of our feminism, and the more ludicrously narcissistic elements of our creeping and sometimes creepy libertarianism. As Orestes Brownson, the 19th century American thinker most influenced by French, Catholic currents of thought, first explained, the Ameri‐ cans—with their merely contractual understanding of the origin of political authority—never have had a proper understanding of the political or national virtues of loyalty and gratitude. Yet comparatively speaking, America remains better off: the family, the nation, and religion and observant religious belief remain strong‐ er here. Thanks mainly to our observant religious believers, we’re still having enough babies to keep ourselves going and more general‐ ly doing what it takes to defend ourselves politically. And we even still think that the old and disabled are mainly still the responsibility of particular families and not some impersonal state. Not only that, we still practice the virtue of personal charity on a grand scale. Many studies, written in the spirit of Tocqueville, illustrate that American conservative Christians are distinguished by their philan‐ thropic generosity and their voluntary care giving, and their church‐ es, at their best at least, are attentive to the whole lives of particular persons. We can even learn from another of today’s French Catholic political philosophic writers, Chantal Delsol, that the virtues most slighted in our high‐tech and exceedingly productive world are those displayed through caregiving, despite the fact that care giving more than productivity displays to us the depths about who we are. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity, while officially extolled every‐ where in Europe today, is at least somewhat more alive in the virtu‐ ous voluntary activity relatively prevalent in our country.
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ocqueville appreciated not only American Christianity but especially our Puritan founders—something that’s not easy for a Frenchman, especially a French Catholic, to do! Yet he found them sophisticated, idealistic, relentless political innovators and re‐ markably free from political prejudices—not to mention the original source of just about all of our institutions of self‐government. They 62
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acted politically on what they believed spiritually—all men are creat‐ ed equal as beings with souls and a immortal personal destiny. Yes, their approach had intrusive, prohibitionist, and compulsory fea‐ tures—but they also believed both that all human beings have souls that deserved to be educated, and that none of them was above the duty of worthwhile work to secure themselves and benefit others. They believed that human beings weren’t only equal as citizens. They are all equally creatures made in the image of God. They’re equal all the way down. From the Puritans, Americans inherited the Christian, egalitarian truth about the human soul. It’s our continuing Christian influence, as Percy explains, that gives the Americans a kind of mish‐mash an‐ thropology. Our understanding of who we are owes something to the modern view that the human being is nothing more than another organism and an environment, but also something to the Judeo‐ Christian view of man as a sovereign wayfarer, the only wonderer and wanderer in the cosmos. The only way to make sense out of this mish‐mash, Percy claims, is for the Americans to recover a kind of Thomistic realism, to show that it’s in our nature as creatures to be ontologically differrent from the other creatures. It’s because we’re hardwired to wonder that we’re hardwired to wander, and modern science isn’t a true science because it can’t realistically account for our undeniably distinctive human experiences. A true science, an authentically postmodern realism, promises to put back together the Lockean/Cartesian and Christian dimensions of the characteristically American self‐understanding.
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rom Percy’s and Tocqueville’s view, the modern science of Lockean/Cartesian laws of nature of our Declaration can’t even begin to account for who we are in our genuinely natural free‐ dom and openness. What’s wrong with modern science is that it fi‐ nally conceives of our words as nothing more than weapons to secure our material being either as individuals (Locke, following Descartes) or parts of a species (Darwin). But the truth is that words are for so much more than that. They open us to the joys that come with know‐ ing together the truth about who we are and what we’re supposed to do. Our founding is a mish‐mash because our science can’t account properly for the creature who wanders or wonders. It can’t account either for the greatness, the joys and the miseries given to us alone. It 63
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can’t even account for the extraordinary holiness of ordinary human life. In his unjustly neglected Images of America (a bestseller when it came out in 1960), French Catholic thinker R.L. Bruckberger explains that the first draft of the Declaration by Jefferson and Franklin was an expression of the philosophy of Locke. Its understanding of who we are can’t help but seem morally lax. The Lockean God is wholly past‐ tense. There’s no sense of his being a living, loving, giving Creator. So we’re completely on our own to secure ourselves, and we have self‐ interested rights by nature but no loving duties. But the more Chris‐ tian members of Congress—Calvinist descendents of the Puritans— demanded that references to the providential and judgmental pre‐ sent‐tense Creator be added to the Declaration. This compromise between our Lockeans and our Puritans was bet‐ ter than the intentions of either of the parties of the compromise. A wholly Lockean Declaration would have marginalized Christians. And a wholly Puritan Declaration would probably have been theo‐ cratic. But the compromise, Bruckberger notices, is a kind of singular work of art. The Lockean Nature’s God is also the God of the Bible, and our freedom that limits government becomes that of not mere individuals but creatures or persons. Our Declaration, Bruckberger suggests, is a kind of accidental Thomism. The American founders built better than they knew, because they, as statesmen, were more influenced by Christianity in practice than they were in theory. That means that the Judeo‐Christian conception of man as sover‐ eign wayfarer—as the wanderer who wonders—has always managed to find a home here. We can say that perhaps Tocqueville ignored the Declaration because of its incoherence, because of his perception of its confused anthropology. We can also say that Bruckberger corrects Tocqueville on a Tocquevillian basis by coming up with another ex‐ ample to the many Tocqueville provides of the ways American prac‐ tice is better than the Lockean theory. But Americans still need a the‐ ory that corresponds fully to who they are and what they’ve done.
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he French can help us see and understand this world now, if not with Tocqueville’s insight, then with something different. With the fall of communism the problem of purpose—or the problem of restless emptiness in the midst of prosperity—has actual‐ ly become far more pronounced in our country, as it has throughout what used to be called the West. Catholic Thomistic Americans, fol‐ 64
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lowing Percy, make a point of only trusting resolutely liberal or anti‐ Communist and anti‐Fascist French writers—such as Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, Manent, Beneton, and so forth. It’s impossible to overemphasize how anti‐Communist and anti‐Fascist the largely homegrown but French influenced American Catholic Thomistic writers were, such as Percy and his greatest inspiration Flannery O’Connor. They alerted us that the modern sentimentality or bound‐ less self‐pity characteristic of the morphing of modern thought into whiny existentialism is what led and what could lead again to the Gas Chamber. The thought that being human is merely being absurd‐ ly miserable easily leads to the thought that all or lots of us should be put out of our misery. We’re only really open to our friendly critics who at least acknowledge that our Christian and bourgeois freedom, with all its individualistic excesses, was noble enough to resolutely resist and eventually defeat communism. As Manent understood, it was Puri‐ tanical America that was courageous enough to win the Cold War, and to win a victory for human nature, for the truth about who we are under God against those who worked for its historical extinction. We need the French now, but not because we want to be French. We can learn from them without surrendering our proper pride in what distinguishes us. Tocqueville came to America as the place where people lived both freely and democratically. In his way, he saw that the future of the world was America, and that was hardly a reason for despair. But nobody can deny that we need help in thinking clear‐ ly about who we are, and that we often feverishly oscillate back and forth between secular and Christian “worldviews.” We need the help of the French, beginning with Pascal, to see our own true greatness and true misery as beings or creatures of a certain kind, to under‐ stand who we are and what we can and cannot do for ourselves.
Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and former chair of the department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. His most recent book is Modern and American Dignity (ISI, 2010). 65
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TRUST & THE REPUBLIC \political0irony| D.C. Innes
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he dominant theme in American politics for the past two years has been distrust. The Tea Party revolt was just one symptom of the dyspeptic mood among voters. Last spring, the Pew Research Center reported that popular trust in government was at its lowest level in fifty years. Only twenty‐two percent of those polled said they trusted Washing‐ ton almost always or most of the time. And as the midterm elections drew near, public confidence dropped even further—which turned into predictably bad news for office‐holders seeking re‐election. It was no comfort for those who were tossed out of office that Americans have been a people rather distrustful of government since the War of Independence over 200 years ago. The very structure of the government our forefathers designed testifies to this, dispersing and checking power, dividing it between branches, between houses, and even between times of election. James Madison explained the reason for this in The Federalist Papers, writing: “[T]he constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.” Institutionalized distrust is essential to the genius and durability of our political order. But today’s young voter has grown up in an age of unusual cynicism. Bill Clinton’s administration seemed to be an unbroken succession of scandals, both foreign and domestic, and, in the view of many, George W. Bush got himself into power by stealing an election and brought the country into war on false pretenses. The election of Barack Obama, who campaigned offering “change you can believe in” and “a new kind of politics,” appealed to the signifi‐ cant number of Americans who want to emerge from this funk and 66
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once again think well of our leaders. Where there is no trust, there can be no such thing as political community. This presents a chal‐ lenge for us as we consider our political future.
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any who are ordinarily skeptical of politicians become light headed with political passion during the courtship of an electoral campaign. But the daily news of actual gov‐ ernment generally sobers them up. Conservatives tend not to trust the government taken as whole because they understand the tenden‐ cy of people to prefer themselves at the expense of others, and those we send to Washington are no different. They agree with the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes who said: “There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.” Yet public authority is a trust, and it is entrusted into the hands of those who govern. If you are going to have government, then to some extent you have to trust those who govern you. The question is how much trust and how precisely to trust. When government speaks, do you trust what it says? Some gov‐ ernments are more trustworthy than others. In the U.S.S.R., no one believed anything the government said. People became blind to the propaganda billboards, and it was common knowledge that govern‐ ment figures on economic output were falsified. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the government delayed telling the public what happened and brought its untrustworthiness to a crisis point. This is not the relationship between the American people and their government. In America, government is scrutinized by the press and accountable to the electorate, and so the American government is more trustworthy and more trusted, regardless of the political party in control. When the Congressional Budget Office publishes figures on the economy, those figures are widely accepted as offered in good faith and with professional attention to accuracy, and so they are cit‐ ed authoritatively. That is trust. Trust is at the heart of democratic, republican government. When people vote, they are choosing the person they think is most trust‐ worthy. Even so, they do not simply rely for good government on a candidate’s character as they judge it. Instead, they hedge him about with safeguards, not only institutional ones (separation of powers, checks and balances), but also political ones (a free press, perhaps government that is divided between parties). 67
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The very fact that people vote indicates a level of trust. People who live in modern republics believe there are enough honest players in the system that it will recognize and elevate the people’s choice of candidate. Anyone who believes that the outcome is “fixed” stays home and abandons the process to fools. This is why in communist countries and other dictatorships people are legally required to vote. Otherwise, no one would waste their time to serve their masters’ false claim of deriving their power from the people. Politics requires trust not just in these barriers to corruption, but in one’s fellow citizens. A genuinely political relationship presupposes a trust that one’s fellow citizens are open to persuasion. Every political campaign and private political discussion among free people pre‐ supposes this. If your neighbors were all complete idiots who con‐ sistently elected criminals, you would withdraw from participation, or in extreme situations, turn to revolution. Citizens must trust one another to be reasonable and deliberative, at least for the most part. Here we find the irony of reality: where there is no trust, there is no political life; but where there is no distrust, political life is short‐lived. If politics is to remain healthy, distrust itself has to be healthy. It has to be suitably bounded and directed. It must listen respectfully and discuss civilly, but test every claim. It must be bounded by laws, and support the laws that wisely and effectively institutionalize the bal‐ ance of trust and distrust. Americans know that government is neces‐ sary, but, by its very nature, dangerous. None of those on either side of the aisle who were elected and re‐ elected in November should allow themselves to be deceived by the applause of their supporters and their margins of victory. They should remember, instead, that as officers of government they are not only a blessing to their country, but also a justified object of popular distrust. With this in mind, they should resolve to serve the public good more consistently, and, in so doing, earn the trust of successive voting majorities. If they are seen to fail in that, then, as our current president recently told his opponents, “That’s what elections are for.”
D.C. Innes is associate professor of politics at The King's College in New York City and co-author of Left, Right, and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Russell Media, 2011). 68
Books & Culture
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T HE F ALLACY OF A PPRECIATION ]art0and0fashion} Maureen Mullarkey
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didactic extension of the Enlightenment project, art appreciation ranks among the idols of our time. Mu‐ seums expand and multiply, cultural stuffs pile up, and art‐gazing swells into a devotional activity. Or‐ dained appreciators broadcast the lux et veritas of the new faith in a ritual torrent of papers, panels, journals, monographs, exhibition catalogs, lectures, artists’ biographies and docent sermons. Today, study of art mimics the communal role bible study once held in our shared public life. John Henry Newman saw it coming. A century and a half ago, he forecast the eventual sacralizing of “accomplishments.” Acquaint‐ ance with art and music—with the refinements we credit as culture— would one day be confused with religious experience. Writing in the 1990s, Louis Dupré seconded the cardinal’s prediction: “Culture itself has become the real religion of our time, absorbing traditional reli‐ gion as a subordinate part of itself. It offers some of the emotional benefits of religion, without exacting the high price faith demands.” By now, we take art appreciation so for granted that we never hesi‐ tate in our assumption that it is an unqualified good. We trust that the proliferation of it—and our participation in it—signals cultural vitali‐ ty. We do not stop to consider that appreciation, dispensed under the banner of education, is an ideology fueled by Panglossian presump‐ tion. Our aesthetic ambition, simultaneously pious and market driv‐ en, is the smiling face of materialism in our time. We mistake the arts to be a “higher” pursuit, in blissful disregard of Aldous Huxley’s reprove: “High brow; low loins.” Pursuit of masterpieces trumps the pursuit of holiness for all the obvious reasons. 70
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Art is good for us; a moral tonic, the thinking goes. The motif re‐ peats in deathless variation. Chief among them is the emergence of art as a crucial factor in—to repeat the latest cant phrase—human flourishing. The arts are important, intoned the National Endowment for the Arts in a study on art in civic life, because they “enhance the study of other areas of the basic curriculum.” They serve “special needs” and aid in the acquisition of vocational skills, especially those vital to the Information Age. Luminous with potential for public ser‐ vice, the arts “contribute to family unity and growth.” For brevity’s sake, skip past the rickety, embattled old formula of transfer of training. Stay with the NEA’s more mischievous assertion: the self‐regarding linkage of arts education to the integrity of the home. It takes museum‐quality cheek to anchor family—and, by ex‐ tension, societal— cohesion in the fine arts; but such is the totalizing nature of the new dispensation. Untroubled by the absence of any supporting evidence, James Cu‐ no, director of the Courtauld, tells us that “museums foster a greater sense of caring in the world.” Looking at art makes us a “happier, wiser, more complete people” croons John Walsh, director emeritus of the Getty. James Wood, director the Art Institute of Chicago, offers the art museum as “a center that holds” amidst societal longing for meaning and value. Neil MacGregor, past director of the National Gallery in London, reminds us that the institution’s gilded founders believed that even the plodding classes had a right to the “consola‐ tion” of art. Precisely how art’s consolations differ from those of fly fishing, the beauty of prime numbers, or the mundane epiphanies of living, does not lend itself to close scrutiny. What matters is grooming disciples for a mass market spirituality free of the costs of religious faith and exalted by bromides clustered around the romance of creativity—a conception cramped and corseted by the arts. And it is never too soon to lace each other into this reductive postu‐ late. Hardly a museum exists that does not feature family‐ and child‐ friendly activities and projects. Toddler Thursdays, Tuesdays for Tots, stroller tours, interactive online play stations, films and work‐ shops for tykes and teens alike are box office stables. Local libraries and community centers offer their own variations. What were once rainy‐day activities and ordinary pleasures have evolved into civic rituals supposed conducive to socialization. Not only is everyone an 71
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artist, as Joseph Beuys proclaimed; but the family that crayons to‐ gether, stays together.
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o much high‐minded hectoring is premised on the fallacy that if we understand a work of art, we will assent to it. Attention does not extend to the possibility of rejecting certain artists or works because we do, indeed, understand them. (The possibility in‐ creases exponentially as art moves closer to us along the timeline.) Neither does it admit the necessity of decoding the grounds on which even canonical art is valued. The very terms of comprehension come to us fixed and amplified by an interdependent nexus of art industry exegetes: critics, curators, academics, foundation and muse‐ um directors, dealers, public relations and marketing pros, and, of course, collectors. Prestige purchasers, many of them museum trustees, have a sub‐ stantial stake in shaping the benchmarks of artistic quality. And shape it they do, glad‐handing around the high rent district to confer cultural legitimacy on specific artists, including those in their own collections. They underwrite museum exhibitions, commission es‐ says, and cultivate curators, editors and écrivains d’art. Journalistic invocations of genius flaunt vocabulary borrowed from science or philosophy into so‐called “art bollocks” (e.g. “the ontological nature of painterly motion;” “conquest of the structuration of space;” “new metaphysics of the pictorial substance”). In this way, the caché of rigorous, systematic disciplines can pass on, unearned, to every tchotchke in a Whitney Biennial. Add to the machinery of consensus—call it the sociology of taste— the influence of major auction houses. Christie’s and Sotheby’s, no longer simply brokers, have mushroomed into international agencies of promotion. Both have established “education” programs that sup‐ port the products they bring to market. Sotheby’s Institute of Art, with branches in New York, London and Singapore, imparts those “professional skills” needed “to interpret contemporary art.” De‐ crypted, that means you can sell any flimflam if you know how to dress it as Art. $51,527 gets you three semesters of coaching in the ethos, manners and patois of the game. Christie’s Education follows suit with a corresponding blend of business training and mystification. Its online brochure cites “aes‐ thetic well‐being,” together with social status, as a rationale for buy‐ ing art. Standard‐issue artspeak, esthetic well‐being is a hollow 72
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phrase, vacant of any intrinsic meaning. It lends itself to whatever claims an artist or institution states in a press release. Like so much of the lexicon of art appreciation, the wording is a conceptual blank, a gesture‐for‐hire, no more than a rental space available for whatever posture or sensibility draws box office. Celebrity plays its own role in conjuring cultural value. It is a swiz‐ zle stick for stirring up shallow responses to work by recognized names. Who but Prada rabble, woozy from citron martinis, could applaud an exhibition of film maker David Lynch’s dog‐patch aes‐ thetic? Or James Franco’s adolescent graphic spurts? Yet, timed to this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, the press went on a publicity jag, hailing Franco as Hollywood’s latest Renaissance man and a tal‐ ented artist to boot. All marks are meaningful; all doodles are draw‐ ings. It is a road for nihilists.
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elebrity anti‐art arrives in a straight line of descent from the drugged‐out doodling of Jean‐Michel Basquiat. By aggressive retreat from any visual criteria, uncontrolled, impulsive mark‐making removes itself from judgment. Apologists can support it solely on the basis of expression, the appreciator’s all‐purpose sol‐ vent. But expression and creative imagination are not the same. There are many kinds of expression: burping, twitching, and blinking are each expressions of something. So are bad teeth and stains on your tie. Mere trumpeting of expression does no honor to art; but it does provide an avenue to celebrity. Basquiat admitted that celebrity mattered more to him than the quality of his art. Lynch and Franco, already well known, can coast on notoriety. Art appreciation both creates celebrity and feeds on it. Few readers will remember Yoko Ono’s “bold performance” of Cut Piece, the 1964 stunt that brought her international recognition as a voice for global harmony. You might, though, have caught her reenactment a few years ago in Paris. Ono sat on a darkened stage dressed in black flow‐ ing silk. The audience was invited to consummate the artwork by snipping off pieces of her wardrobe with scissors provided by the house. Participants were then instructed to send the clippings to a loved one in the name of world peace. Back in ‘64, undressing a nubile, 31‐year‐old Yoko Ono lent the necessary sexual frisson to what was, at bottom, a strip show—high‐ minded honky‐tonk for bien pensants. Uncovering the same woman, some 40 years later, offered more poignant possibilities. Black bra 73
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and panties on an elderly exhibitionist, together with self‐referential bleating about peace (“I was just here to say imagine world peace. … I’m hoping these things will help.”) ought to squelch any chance of seriousness. But art appreciation induces a certain gullibility, even to the point of endorsing Yoko Ono distributing bits of her wardrobe as if they were relics of the True Cross. Britain’s The Independent fell for it, declaring the event part of her “enduring request for world peace.”
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randstanding in the arts has become a habit, like churchgo‐ ing. By making noises about some pretense at social redemp‐ tion or another, artists put themselves beyond the reach of criticism. Any relation between stated intent and actual achievement is rendered undiscussable. Right‐thinking short circuits traditional categories of judgment. It hardly matters if a “work” is good or bad. It’s about Peace, Justice, Choice, Hope, or some other fine abstraction. How could anyone find fault with that? While flawed assumptions of art’s authority does the most damage in the contemporary arena, it distorts public grasp of historic works as well. Take, as one example, Roger Scruton’s response to Manet’s “Olympia”, in his 2009 handbook of essays, Beauty. Even a cultural critic as clear‐eyed as he succumbs to appreciation’s packaged in‐ sights. Manet’s boulevardienne, modeled after Titian’s “Venus”, was greeted with dismay in its time, and for good reasons having nothing to do with prudery. In 1863, the year “Olympia” was painted, syphi‐ lis was a serial killer in France. To ignore that is not to see the paint‐ ing at all, or to glimpse it only partially. Infected husbands brought the disease home to their wives, who passed it, in utero, to children. Whole families were devastated by it. It has been estimated that, at the time, one out of five people were infected. (Manet, a syphilitic like his father, died horribly of complications.) Without that public health perspective, today’s audience can have no grasp whatever of what the painting meant in Manet’s Paris. Scruton skirts any reference to the art of the work, e.g. paint han‐ dling, or other barometers of craft. Instead, he celebrates it as an ex‐ emplum of “self‐identity and self‐awareness.” He heads down the creative writing path with phrasing that echoes the feminist rhetoric of his own time and milieu: “[Olympia’s] knowing expression neither offers the body nor withholds it, but nevertheless has its own way of saying that this body is wholly mine.” 74
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Oh, please Roger! How self‐possessed could any prostitute have been in nineteenth century France? It was rife with cholera and tu‐ berculosis no less than syphilis. Contagion was an ever‐present dan‐ ger and antibiotics not yet invented. Scruton’s gloss illustrates a crucial hazard of synthetic appreciation: the substitution of art history for history itself. We moderns are amused to think Manet’s contemporaries were shocked or outraged by the painting. How quaint, how moralistic, those bourgeoisie! But Manet’s audience understood Olympia better than a modern philos‐ opher glancing back through the narrow lens of art. Scruton looks and sees self‐assurance, a hard‐bitten poise. Manet’s public, bereft of the safeguards of modern medicine, saw a source of infection. In sum, art is an instrument thoroughly of this world. It is not reve‐ lation, as litanies of appreciation pretend. It has no lessons or sanc‐ tions for behavior. It can oblige any purpose, soothe any heart, from the blessed to the cursed. We are lulled into granting art undue def‐ erence because of its ancient alliance with powers of great magnitude and consequence. Once upon a time, art served the sovereignty of the Church and the dominion of princes. It facilitated contemplation of the the Christian story and, later, the contemplation of cosmic order as that was thought manifest in monarchy, dynasty and empire. Yesterday’s handmaid of the state, art today is something else altogether. While it remains the lifeblood of those who make it, art is less important to the true meaning of culture—something distinct from the culture trade—than our tutors would have us think. W.H. Auden had it about right: “The artist, the man who makes, is less important to mankind, for good and evil, than the apostle. ... However much the arts may mean to us, it is possible to imagine our lives without them.”
Maureen Mullarkey is an artist. She has lectured at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has written on art and cultural issues for a lengthy list of national publications. A member of the International Association of Art Critics and the National Arts Club, she is a contributing editor at ArtCritical and a columnist for The New York Sun. Visit her website at maureenmullarkey.com. 75
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G OD ’ S C OUNTRY \the0faithful0sun0belt| Nathan A. Finn From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, by Darren Dochuk. Norton, 2011.
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uch has been written about the Religious Right in the past three decades, including numerous histor‐ ical monographs. Most of the useful early histori‐ cal studies were critical biographies focusing upon key leaders or scholarly essays in journals or pub‐ lished anthologies. Far more common were the Chicken Little as‐ sessments offered by leftwing scholars, many of which posed as seri‐ ous historical studies. Few scholars attempted to interpret the general history of the movement, in part because of a combination of polemi‐ cal intentions, the refusal of some major figures to participate in in‐ terviews with researchers (most notably James Dobson), and minimal access to some of the key primary sources necessary to undertake such a work. Rice University sociologist William Martin made the best attempt toward a scholarly history with his With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, an even‐handed narra‐ tive study that served as a companion to the award‐winning PBS documentary of the same name. After pundits argued the 2004 presidential election was decided by so‐called Values Voters, a new spate of articles and books flooded the market. Some of the more recent works are quite helpful. A revised and expanded version of With God on Our Side was released in 2005. Historians such as Richard Hughes, Randall Balmer, and Kim Phil‐ lips‐Fein added varying degrees of nuance to earlier studies. But as before, most of the new books and articles were attack pieces dis‐ guised as scholarly tomes. Few offered new insights into the origins of the Religious Right; most were far more concerned with what they understood to be the detrimental effects of the movement in the pre‐ 76
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sent. Regardless of authorial perspective, most all the newer studies rehearsed a similar grand narrative that focused upon a takeover of the Republican Party during the late 1970s orchestrated by evangeli‐ cal social conservatives from the Deep South and Southwest. And most considered said takeover to be a very bad thing.
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n his groundbreaking new book From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain‐ Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conserv‐ atism, historian Darren Dochuk challenges this dominant narra‐ tive. Dochuk argues the roots of the Religious Right are not found in Virginia and Texas, but rather in Southern California. The Southern California of the Cold War era was southern in more ways than geography alone. During the Great Depression, thousands of southerners migrated to Southern California from Arkansas, Loui‐ siana, Texas, and Oklahoma. These transplanted southerners estab‐ lished enclaves in the sprawling suburbs built during the post‐war years and “reoriented Southern California evangelicalism toward the South by the late 1960s.” This reorientation included shifting the po‐ litical climate in Southern California decisively to the Right. In the years after World War II, the new political conservatism that began coalescing in Southern California was fueled by evangelicals recently arrived from the South. These evangelicals, most of whom were initially conservative Democrats, championed local and statewide political measures they believed supported traditional val‐ ues, small government, and free enterprise—a vision Dochuk dubs “Jesus and Jefferson.” They founded thriving congregations, univer‐ sities, and parachurch ministries, all of which were friendly toward, if not openly committed to political conservatism. Evangelicals aban‐ doned their Jim Crow roots, pioneered Sunbelt priorities, and net‐ worked widely with less religious political conservatives. They shift‐ ed allegiance to the Republican Party and supported candidates such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the latter with greater suc‐ cess. And they exported their Sunbelt evangelical conservatism back into the South, influencing some of the key leaders normally identi‐ fied as founders of the Religious Right. Rather than a southernization of the Republican Party, the Religious Right represented a southern Californianization of politically engaged evangelicalism and ulti‐ mately the Republican Party. Dochuk builds his narrative around a cast of characters such as Southern California newcomers Jean Vandruff and Marie King, who 77
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appear in several chapters. Their move from humble southern roots to the suburban middle class, and their gradual transition from Jim Crow Democrats to Goldwater and then Reagan Republicans, serves as an example of the larger trend of mass southern emigration to the West Coast, a move resulting in material prosperity, religious re‐ spectability, conservative cultural engagement, and ultimately a new political party. Southern Baptists, the Churches of Christ, Pentecostals (and later Charismatics), and every stripe of nondenominational be‐ lievers served as the grassroots of California’s Republican rise. Fun‐ damentalists and neo‐evangelicals—bitter enemies in ecclesiastical circles—worked side‐by‐side in the cause of political conservatism. Other characters represented the elite who helped articulate, fund, and shepherd grassroots evangelicals into the post‐war conservative movement. Norvel Young became an entrepreneurial educator who wed the Jefferson and Jesus vision with liberal arts education and led Pepperdine University into the very heart of the emerging Republi‐ can Right. George Pepperdine funded the university that bore his name in part because the school promoted both religious and politi‐ cal conservatism. Robert Wells, Archer Weniger, and J. Vernon McGee mobilized large evangelical congregations into conservative political activism. Evangelists Billy Graham and Bill Bright combined religious conservatism with business savvy to sometimes explicitly promote an anti‐Communist and pro‐family political vision. Even non‐Californians such as educator George Benson, financiers R. G. LeTourneau and J. Howard Pew, preacher J. Frank Norris, politician Strom Thurmond, and intellectual Clarence Manion contributed in tangible ways to the new California Republican Party.
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he Left remained troubled by these trends and their ramifica‐ tions for liberal influence in the Golden State. They feared that a rejuvenated, southern‐style California conservatism posed a direct threat to the liberal agenda, including election outcomes, ballot initiatives, the growth of labor unions, the progressive cultural agen‐ da advanced during the 1960s, and stunting the growth of the mili‐ tary‐industrial complex. Their fears were realized as conservatives won numerous local political battles, gradually gained control of the California GOP, and ultimately took possession of the governor’s mansion and other statewide offices. By the 1960s, conservative evangelicals had played a central role in reversing the fortunes of 78
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political liberalism in California and were well on their way to na‐ tionalizing their political and cultural agenda. California Republicans became the vanguard in several key chang‐ es that eventually broke up the Democratic “Solid South” and conse‐ quently transformed the national GOP. California evangelicals aban‐ doned their segregationist roots while their southern counterparts were still pushing back against desegregation. California evangelicals agitated for small government fiscal conservatism while southern conservatives were still benefiting from farm subsidies and similar government programs. In part because of the defense industry head‐ quarters in the region, Southern California conservatives took the lead in promoting a strong national defense, wedding it to a com‐ mitment to family‐focused priorities. Because of the cosmopolitan culture of Southern California, West Coast evangelicals pushed back against religious skepticism, abortion, and homosexuality when those issues were still nascent in the Deep South. Southern California evangelicals also proved less reticent than southerners to align them‐ selves with Roman Catholic conservative intellectuals, including Manion and William F. Buckley. Southern California also served as the home for several future Reli‐ gious Right leaders, especially James Dobson and Tim and Beverly LaHaye. Other West Coast evangelicals were less overtly involved in national leadership circles, but still actively participated in the Reli‐ gious Right; the most important included E. V. Hill, Bill Bright, Pat Boone, Paul and Jan Crouch, and Hal Lindsey. Southern California evangelicals also inspired evangelicals in other regions to become more politically engaged in the conservative cause, including Ed McAteer, James Robison, and most importantly, Jerry Falwell. Yet after West Coast evangelical political conservatism was successfully exported to the South and the East Coast, around the time of Reagan’s election as president, the seedbed of the Religious Right would rarely be identified with the movement it helped to midwife. From Bible Belt to Sun Belt is an important book that will influence how scholars interpret the Religious Right, modern political conserv‐ atism, and twentieth‐century fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Dochuk challenges a number of widely held assumptions. He recasts the origins of the Religious Right as a story as much about East and West as North and South. He demonstrates that far from being unen‐ gaged in politics, conservative Protestants were always involved in 79
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politics at the grassroots level and increasingly involved in national politics well before the 1976 presidential election. He shows Reagan was courting evangelicals (and claiming to be one) long before his second run for the presidency. He argues an emphasis on family val‐ ues predated specific concerns about abortion and homosexuality and evangelicals and fundamentalist were willing to cross ideological divides for political purposes before the advent of the Moral Majori‐ ty. Building upon the scholarship of historians such as Joel Carpenter, Jon Stone, and George Marsden, Dochuk argues that evangelicals never disappeared from public life, but rather focused on building their own subculture; a subculture consistently committed to political conservatism.
Nathan Finn is Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written numerous essays about Baptist history and theology and is on the editorial board of two scholarly journals. 80
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D ISMAL S CIENCE R EDEEMED ,economics0and0virtue< Ryan T. Anderson Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, by John D. Mueller. ISI, 2010.
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n Natural Right and History, the University of Chicago political theorist Leo Strauss challenged the reigning “value‐free” polit‐ ical science of his day, arguing that the study of politics and social life generally could not prescind from questions of right and wrong, good and bad. Against a “historicism” that would reduce all value to the whims of a particular people at a particular time, Strauss maintained that the ancient and medieval quest for a transhistorical standard of nature that revealed natural ends to man was indispensable to the study of politics and political regimes. In‐ deed, Strauss insisted that any purportedly value‐free social science could be shown, in the end, to be variously dependent on judgments of value: judgments of which phenomena ought to be studied and judgments of which features of those phenomena are salient. In other words, “a political life that does not know of the idea of natural right is necessarily unaware of the possibility of political science and, in‐ deed, of the possibility of science as such.” Every science rests on prior evaluative judgments to get the scientific inquiry moving and to keep it running on the right tracks. A generation later, in Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), the Ox‐ ford analytic legal philosopher John Finnis challenged the reigning orthodoxy within the legal academy that uncritically accepted legal positivism, either in its primitive Benthamite form or in the more sophisticated form proposed by Finnis’s mentor H.L.A. Hart. Finnis’s critique paralleled Strauss’s in being two‐pronged, but went deeper in its identification of the grounds of our practical judgments in what 81
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Finnis called “basic human goods,” fundamental and irreducible aspects of human wellbeing and fulfillment that, as such, provide more than merely instrumental reasons for acting and whose integral directiveness offers a rational standard of moral judgment. The first prong of Finnis’s critique showed that even to attempt to perform the type of descriptive legal theory that Hart set out to do requires one to grasp focal cases of law, and thus to grasp the intelligible purposes— the human goods—that law seeks to secure, and that lawmakers must at least claim, for the sake of their own legitimacy, to be pursu‐ ing. Any adequate description, therefore, rests on getting these prior judgments right. The second prong of Finnis’s critique showed how these evaluative judgments in identifying focal cases and principles of right action are possible (hence his defense of basic human goods as first principles of practical reason).
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ow, another generation has passed, and John D. Mueller’s new book, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, seeks to reorient the debates within economic theo‐ ry in the way that Strauss reoriented debates in political philosophy and Finnis reoriented debates in philosophy of law. Mueller’s book is not quite on a par with the other two, for Mueller is not, strictly speaking, an academic: he is currently The Lehrman Institute Fellow in Economics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and has exten‐ sive experience as an economist, speechwriter (to Jack Kemp), and policy advisor (to Ronald Reagan). Redeeming Economics, however, displays the virtue of an author who possesses a breadth and depth of knowledge not only of economics but of a whole host of other top‐ ics, as well (including philosophy, theology, and political theory). Redeeming Economics is an ambitious, wide‐ranging book. Though it clocks in at 450 pages (100 of which are endnotes), it is intended for and accessible to the common educated reader. Its thesis is simple: In order to provide an adequate description of economic activity, one must take seriously the reasons actors have for their economic choic‐ es. Reducing everything to self‐interest and utility is descriptively inadequate, because it fails to take seriously the real nature of eco‐ nomic behavior that seeks to benefit people. Though he is not pri‐ marily wrestling with questions of good and bad, right and wrong, Mueller’s critique is fundamentally akin to Strauss’s and Finnis’s in insisting that economic science attend to the salient aspects of human behavior and that only a sound philosophic anthropology can reveal 82
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which aspects are salient. Mueller knows what he has written isn’t the last word on this topic, but an important first word, intended to provide an overarching critique of current neoclassical economics and launch us into what Mueller dubs “neoscholastic economics.” Neoscholastic economics will take its bearings from the economic theory first articulated by Thomas Aquinas. Unlike those who equate Aquinas with Aristotle, Mueller is clear that his is an AAA theory: “Aristotle + Augustine = Aquinas.” And in the first section of Re‐ deeming Economics, Mueller provides readers with a history of eco‐ nomic theory from Aristotle to today. As Mueller tells the story, Aquinas was the first to put together a complete economic science by combining key insights from both Aristotle (on production, ex‐ change, and political distribution) and Augustine (on personal distri‐ bution and consumption based on utility). Mueller explains:
The first revolution in economics had occurred five centuries before [Adam] Smith, when Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) set forth the basic elements of economic theory. Synthesizing the work of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), Aquinas offered a comprehensive view of human economic actions. All such actions fall into four categories: humans produce, exchange, distribute, and consume goods (human and nonhuman). Thus the theory Aquinas outlined—known as “Scholastic” economics—had four key elements: the theory of production, which explains which goods (and how many of them) we produce; the theory of justice in exchange, which accounts for how we are compensated through the sale of goods for our contributing to their production; the theory of final distribution, which determines who will consume our goods; and finally, the theory of consumption (or utility), which explains which goods people prefer to consume. Production, exchange, distribution, and consumption: Any adequate economic science will need to account for all four of these aspects of economic choice. And Mueller is insistent that this is true of all eco‐ nomic choices, across time and place, for individuals and families, corporations and nations. The second revolution took place when Adam Smith, whom histo‐ ry holds up as the founder of economics, did a grave disservice to the science by eliminating from the economic equation both distribution and consumption based on utility. This incomplete economic science helps explain why classical economics did such a poor job of describ‐ 83
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ing and predicting economic behavior. Neoclassical economics of the previous century or so restored the utility variable, but it, too, Mueller argues, fails in its descriptive and predictive power, because it overlooks and thus reduces an irreducible variable. Only with all four variables restored, by the neoscholastic revolution Mueller hopes to spark, can economics flourish.
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ut before embarking on this fourth revolution, it behooves us to understand where economics went wrong. Joseph Schum‐ peter, the great economic historian of the 20th century, wrote of Adam Smith in his History of Economic Analysis that “the Wealth of Nations does not contain a single analytic idea, principle or method that was entirely new in 1776.” Mueller goes a step further to say not only that Smith does not add anything to economics, but that his theory actually leaves out both distribution and utility. The elimination of these two aspects should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the debates in philosophy and political theory over the so‐called “modernity project.” Consider how a Scholastic such as Aquinas understood various sciences. At the heart of Aqui‐ nas’s social thinking was a recognition that order exists on four irre‐ ducible planes, distinguished by how they relate to our mind and will: the order that exists in nature, independent of human thought and choice; the order that we bring into our thinking itself; the order that we bring into our thinking about what to do; and the order that we bring into our thinking about how to do it. These four orders give rise to four irreducible sciences: first, metaphysics and natural sci‐ ence to study what is, what exists independently of human choice; second, logic to study the relations of concepts; third, ethics and practical philosophy to study what is to be, the ends of human choice; and finally, the applied arts and sciences to study how to achieve those ends, the means. Yet much of modern social thinking rests on the explicit rejection of this third order, and thus of this third science. Machiavelli an‐ nounced the ambitions of this new political science in Chapter 15 of The Prince: “Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preser‐ vation.” In a thinly veiled assault on Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God as the imagined republics and principalities that argued 84
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for how one should live, Machiavelli set out to reveal the “effectual truth” of how successful people do live. Implicit here was a reduction of political thought to the first and fourth orders. Investigate how people are (first order), and then reason about the means (fourth or‐ der), in this case, to staying in power, without any concern for how people ought to be, quite apart from how they might serve our inter‐ ests (third order). Thomas Hobbes and David Hume make this reduction even more explicit. In the Leviathan, Hobbes writes that “the thoughts are to the desires, as scouts, and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired.” And in A Treatise on Human Nature, Hume argues that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” The third‐order science that considered which ends one should act for has been eliminated. It is now for political science to study man’s passions as they are given (first order), and then to devise the best way to secure those ends (fourth order). If this is how one under‐ stands human action, then, of course, distribution (deciding which people should be the ends of one’s economic acts) will be eliminated from consideration. Yet Adam Smith went even further. Taught by David Hume and Francis Hutcheson (the famous Scottish Enlightenment moral sense/sentiment theorists), Smith, in his quest for a Newtonian sci‐ ence of economics and under the influence of Stoic pantheism, went further than his teachers, denying reason a role in selecting either the ends or the means. Smith thought sentiments fully determine human action, so the only variables to explain are production and exchange: a streamlined science with fewer moving parts. This theory of pro‐ duction and exchange logically leads to Karl Marx’s criticisms, based on Smith’s faulty “labor theory of value” of modern capitalism.
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ith time, economists came to understand just how thin this theory really was. They reintroduced the concept of con‐ sumption based on utility (helpfully refining the idea into one of marginal utility), a reintroduction of the Augustinian under‐ standing of consumption corrected for the problems in both Smith and Marx. Rather than viewing the worth of objects for human con‐ sumption as intrinsic to the object (or the labor that produced the object), the theory of utility saw that an actor’s preference for an ob‐ ject, based in the utility it brought, explained the value in and the 85
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choice for the object. But this still left unexplained the choice of which person(s)—self, other(s)—would obtain the object. That is, it left out distribution. Rediscovering that element of economic science is at the heart of Redeeming Economics. Consider Harvard‐educated Yale Professor David R. Mayhew’s highly influential and widely acclaimed 1974 book Congress: The Elec‐ toral Connection. The book’s underlying thesis—and assumption—is that congressmen are “single‐minded seekers of reelection.” With this starting point in place, Mayhew can engage in empirical research and interpret his findings accordingly. Not surprisingly, all of the activities that congressmen engage in—advertising, credit‐taking, and position‐taking—can be accounted for, in his model, as means to the end of reelection. Or consider the work of Lee Epstein and Jack Knight in what is viewed as the most important book on judicial behavior in the past generation, The Choices Justices Make. In explaining the causes of jus‐ tices’ behavior, Epstein and Knight write, “Among the most im‐ portant of these is the primacy of policy preferences; that is, judicial specialists generally agree that justices, first and foremost, wish to see their policy preferences etched into law. They are, in the opinions of many, ‘single‐minded seekers of legal policy.’” While policy pref‐ erences are the most important determinant, according to Epstein and Knight, they go on to show how Justices act strategically, given the institutional constraints of the Court and other branches of gov‐ ernment, to get their preferred outcome. Both of these examples, from Congress and from the Court, show the insufficiency of the reigning models of political science. They are either simply false, or they’re tautological. Anyone familiar with elected officials, or who pays any attention to electoral politics, knows there are differences among politicians. Some really are sin‐ gle‐minded reelection seekers. But some aren’t. Some take positions on controversial issues that cost them votes, and they do so knowing that it will cost them votes. Are the actions of a Rick Santorum or Sam Brownback or, for that matter, a Joe Lieberman, best understood as rationally selected means to the end of reelection? Or might some politicians take positions on policy that they truly think best, conse‐ quences be damned? This is an empirical question. And an empirical science can answer it only if it does not start by assuming an answer. 86
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So, too, with the Court. Without a doubt, there are some justices whose behavior has quite explicitly revealed that their loyalty is not to the Constitution, but to the policy outcomes they prefer. But is this the best explanation of Scalia’s vote to uphold the constitutionality of flag burning? Might Justice Scalia and Citizen Scalia vote differently if it came to a question of the current constitutionality of flag burn‐ ing, and the question of whether to amend the Constitution to pro‐ hibit it? Insofar as good constitutional law is simply treated as a “le‐ gal policy” preference, then the theory simply becomes a tautology; the input and the output of the theory contain the same exact varia‐ ble: justices decide cases according to how they think cases should be decided. This is, of course, no explanation at all.
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mention these two examples from political science to show how similar faulty assumptions lie at the heart of economic science (which views man as a “single‐minded utility seeker”), and thus Redeeming Economics can profitably be read by many social scientists seeking a cure for what ails their disciplines. Mueller, following Gary Becker, notes that most modern economic theory assumes that “con‐ sumers derive satisfaction or ‘utility’ directly from products that they purchase in the market from business firms and that in demanding such goods, consumers seek to maximize their satisfaction.” Mueller then discusses Becker’s helpful modifications to this theory. But with or without modifications, Mueller argues the theory is incomplete, for the choice of goods as means does not tell us whom the goods will be chosen for as ends. Insofar as economic theory addresses the issue of ends at all, it pushes it off as if it were a normative question. But this question cannot be removed from any descriptive theory, for an adequate theory needs to provide an analysis of the ends cho‐ sen. As Mueller writes, “Neoclassical economics does not provide a coherent, empirically verifiable description of how people actually choose—rightly or wrongly—to distribute the use of their resources, whether as individual persons, as members of a family household, or as a whole society under the same government.” Insofar as contem‐ porary economists have tried to answer the question, they “have tried to deduce final distribution from utility—in effect, to argue that the economic means determine the economic ends.” But as we have seen from the above examples in political science, this “approach relies on circular logic, and its hypotheses about final distribution are either empirically false or not falsifiable [i.e., are tautologies].” 87
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Mueller’s discussions of Augustine’s theory of distribution are per‐ haps the most important contributions of Redeeming Economics. He praises the scholastic theory of economics because it can be formulat‐ ed as “a set of economic equations” that is “logically complete,” “empirically verifiable,” “purely descriptive,” “valid at every level of analysis,” and, therefore, such that “the outline itself never changes in the least.” But this is possible only with the reintroduction of dis‐ tribution. Augustine’s key insight was that, no matter what, “every human does, as a matter of fact, always act with some person(s) as the ultimate end or purpose of action.” While Augustine’s normative teaching about the proper ordering of loves sought to guide people to make the right choices in selecting God and other people as ulti‐ mate ends, one shouldn’t overlook the reality that all of our choices, right or wrong, place someone as the end of our actions. Economic science goes wrong in assuming that “every human acts solely for him‐ or herself. That is precisely what each person is free to decide.” As Mueller argues, “each of us has not only a scale of pref‐ erences for instrumental goods as means but also a scale of prefer‐ ences for persons as ends of our actions.” With this understanding in place, Mueller can develop his modified Augustinian theory of gifts, exchange, and crimes. Whereas contemporary economics reduces all human activity to exchanges, Mueller argues that we make gifts to‐ wards those we particularly love, commit crimes against those we fail to love, and make exchanges with those in between. The crucial distinction is one between benevolence and benefi‐ cence. While we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, we are not (because it would prove impossible) called to love our neighbor equally with ourselves. Mueller argues that, for Augustine and Aquinas, there are “two ways in which we can love our fellow man: benevolence, or goodwill, which can be extended to everyone in the world, and beneficence, or doing good, which cannot.” Because our goods are scarce resources, we cannot be beneficent with everyone; we have to prioritize certain people (ourselves, our families, our im‐ mediate neighbors) to be the objects of our economic actions. As Au‐ gustine taught, “Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay spe‐ cial regard to those who, by accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.” At the same time, we can be benevolent to all by respecting their wellbeing 88
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in refraining from causing harm (in economic‐speak, in refraining from giving them a negative value on the distribution scale).
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n addition to his discussion of the history of economics, Mueller insightfully applies his neoscholastic economic theory to topics of personal economy (the “mother’s problem,” homicide, and the Good Samaritan), domestic economy (discussions of marriage, childbearing and rearing, lifetime family earnings and spending), and political economy (discussions of infant industry, unemploy‐ ment, and inflation). The book closes with a short but insightful con‐ sideration of “divine economy” and the three different worldviews that underlie classical, neoclassical, and neoscholastic economic theo‐ ries. Two of Mueller’s applied discussions merit particular attention: abortion and crime, and parenthood and population. In 2001, John Donohue and Freakonomics co‐author Steven Levitt claimed that “legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.” Mueller writes that Donohue and Levitt’s theory followed the “economic approach to human be‐ havior,” based on “a highly restrictive set of assumptions to reduce human behavior to the choice of means—a maximization of ‘utili‐ ty’—but also gratuitously redefines utility as a synonym for pleas‐ ure.” Investigating the same crime data, Mueller proposes to use his “human approach to economic behavior” to better explain the phe‐ nomenon by considering distribution based on “preferences for per‐ sons” and utility as our “order of preference for economic goods as means for those persons.” Donahue and Levitt make a straightforward argument: Women abort babies when the utility in aborting is higher than the utility in bringing the pregnancy to term. Babies aborted now are less likely to commit crime 20 to 24 years later; and because crime is dispropor‐ tionately committed by African Americans, and because African‐ American babies are disproportionately aborted, the first effect is magnified. Their theory, Mueller argues, does not consider why peo‐ ple commit crime, but relies on an “environmental” explanation that people in lower socioeconomic classes simply commit more crime. Having fewer of “them” will result in fewer crimes committed. Mueller’s response entails both a broadening of the data examined (he goes back further in history to examine all of the 20th century’s crime fluctuations, and not just post‐Roe behavior), and a deepening of the reasons examined. He notes that the data do not quite fit the 89
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story Donahue and Levitt tell about abortion and 20‐year‐delayed crime rates, but that the data do fit current rates of fatherhood and current crime rates. What Donahue and Levitt failed to realize is that the same young adults who pressure their girlfriends to have abor‐ tions—or who otherwise act as absentee fathers—are the same young adults who currently commit crime. The distribution function of their actions, demonstrating a strong preference for themselves over love of their children, begins to show the psychology involved not in ranking means and utility, but in ranking persons and distribution. In other words, “those behaviors which involve raising the significance of the self relative to other persons (crime and other antisocial behav‐ ior) also should be positively correlated with one another.” Applying his thesis to what really explains the abortion data, Mueller argues that “since the vast majority of homicides are committed by men, and because not all biological fathers take responsibility for their chil‐ dren, we should see the largest opposite shifts in the rates of econom‐ ic fatherhood and homicide,” for “the time devoted to committing crimes against others is a subset of time not devoted to helping them.” When Mueller empirically tests his theory, he finds that “over the sixty‐five years for which we have data, there is a 90 percent in‐ verse trade‐off between the current homicide rate and the current rate of economic fatherhood.” He concludes: “both Augustine’s and Becker’s theories can explain the behavior of people who are selfish, but only Augustine’s can explain the behavior of people who aren’t.” In a similar way, Mueller uses his neoscholastic economic theory to explain why people have children. Current economic thinking tries to explain fertility rates in relation to social spending by the state and to national savings, the idea being that people have kids for reasons of economic utility, and when there is great social spending and sav‐ ings, children are less useful. But Mueller insists, and has the facts to show, that neoclassical economics cannot “explain anything so fun‐ damental as fertility—the reproduction of human persons—without the element of economic theory that describes one’s preferences for persons.” As Mueller sees it, “people have children either because they love the children for their own sakes, or else because they love themselves and expect some personal benefit from the children (or some combi‐ nation of these motives).” While government social spending and national savings might relate to the second reason, they do nothing 90
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to address the first. As an empirical measure of this, Mueller looks to weekly worship rates—a proxy for one’s preference for someone oth‐ er than self—for “whether the other person is God or another human being,” the decision to worship each week “entail[s] sacrificing scarce goods that could otherwise have been used for oneself.” The data show “the rates of weekly worship and fertility are always positively related across countries, with relatively minor variation by religious denomination.” Once “purely selfish factors are accounted for, acting on belief in God ... makes the crucial difference as to whether people reproduce themselves. It suggests that the personal gift of time and resources involved in worship is closely systematically associated with the personal gift of having children for their own sake rather than for the pleasure and utility of the parents.” Mueller knows that his explanation of fertility rates “is not the last word” on the matter. Rather he offers it “as a first effort in what promises to be a fruitful new program of research.” The same could be said for the entirety of Redeeming Economics. It repays reading and re‐reading, and its discussions of historical, analytical, and applied topics will be invaluable for anyone working in economics, political science, and philosophy, especially those working at the intersection of the three: political economy. For those concerned with normative questions of how we ought to structure of common economic life, an adequate description of that economic life will be required. But that description can be given only by recovering a more adequate anthro‐ pology. Utility must be seen at the service of persons. Utilitarianism fails both as a prescriptive and descriptive theory. And John Mueller has helped us all to “rediscover the missing element.”
Ryan T. Anderson is editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, where this article previously appeared. Read more at thepublicdiscourse.com. 91
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A CHASTISED SECULARISM ]godless0salvation} David J. Davis Learning to Live: A User’s Manual, by Luc Ferry. Canongate, 2010.
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he critique of secularism is well under way in higher education. George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University and Steven D. Smith’s recent book The Disen‐ chantment of Secular Discourse carefully trace the devel‐ opment and negative impact of secularism on society. In Decline of the Secular University, John Sommerville has deftly shown how secularism is self‐annihilating, because by marginalizing faith it has evacuated much of the traditional importance and transcendent significance in the humanities, which has been a fortress of secular‐ ism in the twentieth century. Like John Locke, who absolutely did not trust atheists, it is easy to lump all secularists together into the same proverbial boat—das Narrenschiff. Having spent most of my academic life in secular uni‐ versities, I can sympathize with such totalizing opinions, and there is some truth in them. However, not all secularists are the same. There are dogmatists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and juvenile polemicists like Christopher Hitchens. Some secularists, like Jonathan Rauch, are indifferent apatheists. Others like Umberto Eco paternalize (and patronize) faith, fitting Jesus cozily alongside Bud‐ dha, Muhammad, the Báb, and Joseph Smith. While none of these secularists take religion seriously, unless they view religion as a seri‐ ous threat, their opinions diverge radically. Thus, we should address them in different ways. Another brand of secularism is exemplified by Luc Ferry’s book Learning to Live: A User’s Manual. Ferry examines how five major 92
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philosophical movements treat “the doctrine of salvation” (ie. salva‐ tion from the fear of death). His purpose is twofold: to present a new model of doing philosophy by focusing on worldview formation (though he does not use this phrase) and to assess the current state of secular systems of morality. A secular humanist himself, Ferry pro‐ vides remarkably fair readings of five philosophies: Stoicism, Chris‐ tianity, Humanism, Postmodernity, and Deconstruction. In addition to his own analysis, Ferry represents a secularism that is honest and engaged with religious discourse, but is also tragic in its implications for all secular worldviews.
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first encountered Luc Ferry, philosophy professor and former French Minister of Education, through his work French Philosophy in the Sixties, where he renders a cogent historical critique of the postmodernity of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, et al. Learning to Live, however, is more of an exploratory essay than an academic vol‐ ume. As such, this may be Ferry’s most important work in terms of accessibility and impact. Written to undergraduates in a personal and approachable style, Ferry sets out a manifesto directed at reinvigorat‐ ing philosophy with the purpose of creating a good and healthy soci‐ ety, aligning philosophy once again with its ancient roots of learning to live and finding what the Greeks called “the good life.” Philosophy can no longer passively expound upon ideas in Ferry’s view. It must create ways of living in the world. Demanding a return to the grand questions of the human condition, Ferry describes phi‐ losophy as “an art not of questions but rather of answers.” This art cannot be merely memorized or measured, it must be lived. The book calls philosophers to put on their workaday boots and restore philos‐ ophy as a practical way of addressing the questions raised by human mortality and corruption. To this end, Ferry sets off on a whirlwind excursion across two thousand years of philosophy in order to inves‐ tigate which models can still prove useful. In this “quest,” he is dubi‐ ous of utilitarian technique and of anything that smacks of “erudition stripped of meaning … [or] the search for wisdom.” As an attempt to realign philosophy, the book is a piercing chal‐ lenge, which should be read alongside other books (e.g. Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom) that reassert the im‐ portance of the humanities and liberal arts more generally. In a way, Learning to Live holds the line against the technique‐based, skills‐ 93
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oriented university model, which is geared toward creating workers rather than wise citizens and good people. Learning to Live also portrays the tension within modern secularist thought. On the one hand, Ferry believes that a coherent moral sys‐ tem without religion is achievable, but on the other hand his assess‐ ment of all “secular morality” to date is negative if not damning. Fer‐ ry sums up secular liberalism as little more than “an ensemble of values” cobbled together under “obligations and imperatives.” Alt‐ hough Ferry’s critique is not as thorough as others (e.g. John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake), he believes such models as they stand lack the transcendental qualities to address human significance and value. Chapters on Postmodernity and Deconstruction epitomize Ferry’s dissatisfaction with the road secularism has taken. He seems almost disgusted with Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati and the rise of relativism. Ferry is unwilling to utter the Nietzschean ‘yes’, to em‐ brace even the most grotesque parts of reality. Instead, Ferry believes that philosophy “must try to go beyond philosophical materialism.” From a Christian perspective, Ferry’s bold words are both exciting and confusing, and not a little bit tragic. It is not at all clear what ex‐ actly is beyond the material world for a secularist like Ferry. Would not the answer to such a question commence with some sort of theo‐ logical (or at least metaphysical) discourse? Ferry admits as much, saying “in the absence of a cosmos or a God, it becomes especially difficult” to consider a coherent and meaningful idea of salvation. Like Immanuel Kant before him, Ferry’s nods toward a transcenden‐ talism are too ambiguous to be useful, leaving the reader wondering to where or what he is transcending.
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o then, what exactly are we to make of Ferry’s search for “salva‐ tion without God”? Certainly, Ferry’s secularism is of a chas‐ tised kind. He admits the failures of secularism as well as the achievement of Christian thought (though he blames Christianity for diminishing philosophy’s importance). He is adamant that secularists “have no right to ignorance” about religion. His own chapter on Christianity is a model example of this advice, as he accurately em‐ phasizes the importance of the resurrection, the influence of New Testament ethics in shaping human rights, and the value invested in the human body in Christian thought. Throughout the book, Ferry has the highest praise for Christianity (compared to other secular‐ ists). He argues that because of its improvements on Stoic morality 94
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coupled with the personal, incarnate Logos “nothing can compete with Christianity.” Despite this admission, however, Ferry fails to overcome the book’s most fundamental (and misguided) assumption—the strict divide between philosophy and religion. Ferry is a sincere secularist and a post‐Kantian philosopher after all, which in his mind precludes him from being a man of faith. This is the tragedy of Learning to Live. Ferry is too honest with him‐ self to escape into secular dogmatism and too much of a secularist to choose the alternative. He explains, “the Christian proposition [is] infinitely more tempting—except for the fact that I do not believe in it.” The power of this confession is tangible throughout. His efforts to conjure a viable alternative read like a humbled and near‐hapless version of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian.
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he most endearing quality about Learning to Live is that it lacks the robust and snide tone of the British mathematician. For even with his ethic of “a wisdom of love,” Ferry rightly con‐ fesses that it is “small beer” compared to the Christian gospel. But there is also a tenacity and bullheadedness about Ferry’s ethic. It dei‐ fies the self like all secularism, and it does so with a level of ambigui‐ ty and eclecticism that will present challenges when others engage this “secularized Christianity.” Along with this, the uninitiated reader should beware that Ferry’s text can be misleading. The introduction’s claim to being a history of philosophy is erroneous. Footnotes and index are non‐existent, and the bibliography is minimal. Ferry can be incredibly anachronistic, so that Augustine and Blaise Pascal (whom he admires) share the same few pages as do Rene Descartes, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, and Im‐ manuel Kant. Philosophical movements like John Locke’s liberalism, David Hume’s empiricism, Georg Hegel’s idealism, and Ayn Rand’s objectivism are not mentioned. Also, Ferry’s account of modern phi‐ losophy smacks of nineteenth‐century progressive triumphalism over faith, transforming all Enlightenment thinkers into skeptics. The truth is that many (e.g. Rene Descartes and Galileo Galilei) champi‐ oned against epistemic relativism. Finally, the book’s division be‐ tween philosophy and religion is a recent invention and would be foreign to the majority of philosophers and religious thinkers throughout history. 95
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However, the benefits of reading Learning to Live are greater than the sum of these hampered parts. This book has much to offer the cautious reader. It is a primer on a new, yet traditional, way of doing philosophy, it speaks to a call to arms against the marginalization of the humanities, and it offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the ongoing debate it features. If Pascal is right that in order to cor‐ rect error “we must see from what point of view he is approaching the matter,” then this book is among the most germane volumes in addressing secularism.
David J. Davis is Assistant Professor in History at Houston Baptist University. His articles and book reviews on the intellectual and cultural history of early modern England have appeared in Word & Image, The Journal of the Early Book Society, Cultural and Social History, and ERAS. 96
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T HE B ARD, P OLITICIZED [shakespeare0the0just{ Micah Mattix A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice, by Kenji Yoshino, Ecco, 2011.
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enji Yoshino’s A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shake‐ speare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice begins with a curi‐ ous assertion: “I do not have a definition of justice. I am drawn to literature rather than to philosophy be‐ cause I would rather deal with the messy, fine‐grained gloriously idiosyncratic lives of human beings than with vaulting abstractions.” The distinction between the concreteness of literature and the “vaulting” abstractions of philosophy is common enough. The most well‐known is Sir Philip Sidney’s. In his Defense of Poesy, he distin‐ guishes between philosophy, which defines virtue in the abstract, and poetry, which provides concrete images of virtue. Poetry is a “speak‐ ing picture.” It is virtue “figured” in the concrete. In other words, poetry provides a more accessible portrait of abstract virtues. But this is not the distinction Yoshino, a law professor at NYU and a gay rights activist, has in mind. For him, literature provides a “messier,” more contradictory portrait of abstract virtues, not a more accessible one. Whether he believes it or not, Yoshino suggests here that philosophy misses something when it defines things in the ab‐ stract. It is incapable of providing an accurate portrait of virtues such as justice because it always excludes the messier, contradictory ele‐ ments of the term in its effort provide a “coherent” definition. There is an element of truth in this critique of the limitation of phi‐ losophy, but it is so often misunderstood or abused that whatever 97
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might be gained from it is almost immediately lost. Such is the case here. While it is true enough that philosophy has failed to provide us with a complete and coherent definition of all that is, this does not mean that we can make no truth statements about what is or formu‐ late no definitional absolutes. In the end, Yoshino’s refusal to define justice in the abstract and look rather at discrete images of justice in Shakespeare’s plays does not provide a more nuanced understanding of the virtue. Quite the opposite, it allows Yoshino to play fast and loose with the term in order to co‐op his politicized readings of Shakespeare’s plays under the 21st century’s most fashionable and prestigious term. And so Titus Andronicus reminds us of the folly of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, motivated as they were, according to Yoshino, by simple blood lust; Measure for Measure reminds us that excellent judges are those who, like Sonya Sotomayor, are able to make judgments based on empathy as well as precedent; and Mac‐ beth somehow shows us the danger of believing that we live in a “purposeful universe.”
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oshino’s readings can also be downright bizarre. Take his un‐ derstanding of King Lear for instance. The play, Yoshino ar‐ gues, shows us “how madness permits a more profound ap‐ prehension not only of justice, but of its limits.” Yoshino continues: “Ironically, while this madness is inimical to law, it may be necessary to justice. Only by surrendering his relationship to reality is Lear able to see a perfectly distilled form of justice.” How does Yoshino arrive at this nugget of moral wisdom? Well, it begins with reading Lear’s abdication as a good and lawful thing. You may remember that Lear, tired of ruling, proposes “To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths while we / Unburthen’d crawl toward death.” He divides his kingdom in three and proposes to give the largest plot to the daughter who loves him most. The elder two daughters flatter Lear, but Cordelia, the third, who is Lear’s favorite, refuses, claiming right‐ ly that Lear’s elder daughters are not being honest. Lear becomes enraged and marries her off with no dowry to the King of France. Lear divides his kingdom between his two elder daughters. They conspire against him (and one another), but Cordelia returns secretly with French troops to restore order. She is motivated not by “blown ambition,” she notes, but “love, dear love, and our ag’d father’s right.” While she succeeds in thwarting her sisters, she and Lear die. 98
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(Other, older versions of the story have Lear being restored to power and Cordelia ruling after his death.) The entire thrust of the play is that when people lose sight of their proper role in society and try either to shirk their God‐given responsibilities (Lear) or usurp God’s hierarchy (Goneril, Regan and Edmund), chaos ensues. This theme is what ties the Lear narrative and the Gloucester narrative, which pre‐ viously existed separately, together in Shakespeare’s play. Yet Yoshino prefers to read the play in his own idiosyncratic way. Lear’s abdication, Yoshino argues, is motivated by his concern for his kingdom. He understands that “he is—or will soon become—unfit to rule his country,” and in proposing the “love test,” Lear “is trying to extricate himself from a difficult legal predicament while preserving the rule of law.” This fails and as Lear goes mad, he sees, Yoshino writes, a “more perfect” form of justice, though what that might be is distinctly unclear. At first, Yoshino writes, it is Lear’s vision of the judgment of “the great gods,” but this, Yoshino later states, is merely a fantasy. So what is this more perfect form of justice? Who knows? Instead, Yoshino offers a number of ponderous statements with the word justice in them. “Lear can return from heath to house, but not from justice to law,” Yoshino writes. Or: “I believe Cordelia must die in this play to help us understand the unavoidable injustice of death.” No doubt Shakespeare’s plays have been put to use in innu‐ merable arguments, but Yoshino has managed to distinguish himself by the very implausibility of his readings.
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he lack of any sort of definition of justice also haunts Yoshino’s reading of Hamlet. The perennial question of the play is why does Hamlet delay revenging his father’s “most foul” murder? Yoshino rightly reminds us that Hamlet passes up the opportunity to kill Claudius after “The Mousetrap” has been performed and Clau‐ dius appears to be confessing his sins. The reason, Hamlet tells us, is that if he were to kill Claudius now his uncle would go straight to heaven. His father, however, was killed in his sleep without his last confession, and, therefore, must wander the plains of Denmark. What sort of justice is this, Hamlet asks, and Yoshino agrees with him. Hamlet sheaths his sword, and Yoshino interprets his delay as a no‐ ble, though impractical, pursuit of “perfect” justice. Yoshino writes: “What we see in Hamlet is not just a commitment to moral perfec‐ tionism, but also the bottomless cost of that commitment.” For 99
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Yoshino, the moral is something like: Don’t be such a perfectionist. You might hurt other people. But, of course, Hamlet’s desire for what Yoshino calls “perfect” but also “poetic” justice and “perfect revenge” (as if these all somehow mean the same thing) is not noble at all. In fact, like Creon in Antigo‐ ne who refuses to bury Polyneices, Hamlet presumes to act in the place of God, taking not only the life of Claudius, but damning his soul as well. In the end, Hamlet’s waiting is motivated more by un‐ seemly revenge, not justice, which, in turn, leads to a slew of other deaths. Shakespeare can teach us something about justice. What we have instead in A Thousand Times More Fair is Yoshino himself, center‐ stage.
Micah Mattix is Assistant Professor in Literature at Houston Baptist University and Reviews Editor of T H E C I T Y . 100
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Sweet Recess Geoffrey Brock It’s odd: the sacred world can pass for years Unseen, then fill your eyes, stopping you still, As if God had stooped to whisper in your ears Look there: the nuthatch on the kitchen sill, Feathers ruffled to fatness against the cold; The neighbor’s listing shed, its siding (white Once, gray and peeling now) recast in gold By early evening’s kind alchemic light; Or one you love, framed in the entryway, Wholly herself, and you for once abstracted From fierce desire, its lenses and scaffoldings, And left by language, which will not convey The sense of stupid wonder that, though muted, Fills the cage of your ribs with a riff of wings.
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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker
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any are now taking note of Allen Guelzo’s essay in Touchstone on evangelical colleges in America. He points out a number of troubling issues, noting that few of these schools are selective, alumni are not giving, and many of the schools are in bad financial condition despite the continued rise in tuition rates. When I took over responsibility for strategic planning at Houston Baptist University back in 2007, I studied many of these same chal‐ lenges. My goal was to get a sense of our position in the market so that we could speak intelligently to donors about what we needed. I discovered the relative lack of high endowments among Christian institutions (and the high reliance on tuition that goes with the lack of such endowments). In addition, I noted the near complete lack of doctoral programs in areas outside of professional training such as education or counseling. Christian universities are not able to afford graduate fellowships or stipends. If the programs don’t generate rev‐ enue, we don’t offer them. Guelzo doesn’t mention that. Neither does he mention the competitive disadvantage for scholars at our institutions who wish to pursue publication. At many top sec‐ ular institutions, professors teach only two courses each semester. Sometimes less. Our professors almost always teach four courses per semester, which is a consuming task if you do it well. I could go on. We have fewer scholarly centers and think tanks, hold less conferences, publish fewer journals . . . You get the idea. We are fighting hard to accomplish our missions, but scarcity is much more real to us than it is to many of our counterparts in state schools who think they have budget constraints. 102
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All of this is why it was such a galactically big deal when Robert Sloan was in charge at Baylor University and working to make that school into a Carnegie research institution which was simultaneously emphasizing its fealty to the Christian intellectual tradition. When he was forced to resign, many who follow these things closely were de‐ spondent. The worst fears were not realized, though, and Baylor has continued to move forward as a comprehensive (and Christian) insti‐ tution and has about a billion dollars in endowment. Baylor is now a haven for some of the finest Christian scholars on earth. This is a huge accomplishment. Kenneth Starr gives every indication of being the right person to shepherd Baylor’s continued flight along this nearly uncharted path. I am somewhat surprised Guelzo would leave the Bears out of his excellent essay. In addition, Guelzo has missed the ascendancy of some other Christian universities on a smaller scale. For example, just as one Christian school, Lambuth University, announced its closing here in Jackson, Tennessee, Lambuth’s longtime sister school, Union Univer‐ sity, has enjoyed record enrollments and is receiving some excellent gifts. Union’s budget has nearly quintupled over the last 15 years and the school outperforms just about all of its peers in terms of financial health. A study of the percentage of students admitted at Union wouldn’t tell the story Guelzo suggests it does. Union likely admits a majority of the students who apply, but that is part of its model. Un‐ ion sets out to attract applications from students who are a good fit spiritually and academically. Union’s selectivity would be better measured by a look at the mean ACT scores of its recent freshman classes, which have been very high. Just as Guelzo wrote about institutions with which he is familiar, I have referenced some of the ones I know best. I imagine some could come forward with success stories and others with tales of fingernail‐ hanging survival. I suspect the reality is that Christian universities, as a sector, are undergoing some serious sifting. A wise man once told me several will close in the next decade. I agree with Guelzo that there are very possibly too many and that we would benefit from consolidation. A stronger, smaller lineup of institutions would all be cultural gamechangers if they remained faithful. We don’t control these things (the life and death of universities), though, from some central Christian planning office for what we per‐ 103
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ceive to be the maximum advantage. Some institutions will fail. Oth‐ ers will surprise us and announce amazing new gifts and programs. What we can control, however, are matters to which Guelzo allud‐ ed. We can hire faculty who care about the mission and not just about their guilds. We can hire presidents with vision for distinctively Christian higher education and not for education as a commodity to be sold like gasoline or grain. We can install core curricula which actually help students become well‐rounded and well‐educated hu‐ man beings who understand their cultural context, their history, and the interrelationship of the disciplines. Finally, we can make the case to donors to meet our greatest needs. We need scholarships and scholarship endowments so we can com‐ pete with the state universities on price. We need investments in en‐ dowed chairs, funded centers, and journals which can provide lighter teaching loads for our productive scholars. Donors, if you are read‐ ing this, then understand that the Christian university can provide a tremendous bang for the buck culturally. We educate the student. We provide the student with a spiritual community. We teach them to put their minds and spirits to work in tandem. Our scholars can teach, write, and speak into the world conversation. We can convene scholars into networks of influence. Read Guelzo. Heed his essay. And help us do what only the Chris‐ tian university can do.
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have been reading Rob Moll’s excellent Intervarsity Press book The Art of Dying. One of Moll’s key points is that we know we will die and in order to do so well, we need to have thought about it ahead of time. He doesn’t mean that we should obsess about death, sleep in caskets, or wear black all the time like a disturbed woman I saw on a television program. Instead, he encourages us to think about what it means to have a good death. While we are removed from the immediate danger, take advantage of the calm to consider how we should die and how we should make decisions about dying. As I thought more about it, I realized that Moll’s insight about death has a lot to do with both moral and political thinking generally. One of the great reasons to draw up a constitution, for example, is to try to set up rules ahead of time. We need to have considered the 104
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possible situations for which law will be needed and to propose them now before they happen and we are caught up with either interest‐ edness or our passions. As I wrote a few years ago in the wake of the Virginia Tech shoot‐ ings, “unprepared and without prior thought, none of us know how we will react in these situations. But we can prepare ourselves for the event and drastically increase the chance that we will do what we merely hope we would.”
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hristians have a deep ambivalence about Ayn Rand that probably draws as deeply from the facts of her biography as from her famous novels. When the refugee from the old Sovi‐ et Union met the Catholic William F. Buckley, she said, “You are too intelligent to believe in God.” Her atheism was militant. Rand’s holy symbol was the dollar sign. Ultimately, Buckley gave Whittaker Chambers the job of writing the National Review essay on Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged that effectively read her and the Objectivists out of the conservative movement. The review characterized Rand’s message as, “To a gas chamber, go!” Chambers thought Rand’s philosophy led to the ex‐ tinction of the less fit. In truth, the great Chambers (his Witness is one of the five finest books I’ve ever read) probably treated Rand’s work unfairly. Though Rand made no secret of her contempt for those un‐ able or unwilling to engage in true exchange of economic value, she was right to tell interviewers that she was no totalitarian. She ab‐ horred the use of force. She did not believe in compulsion. Instead, she wanted a world in which a man stood or fell on his productivity. Rand saw production as the one great life affirming activity. Man does not automatically or instinctively derive his suste‐ nance from the earth. He must labor and produce. This was Rand’s bedrock and explains why she had such contempt for those who try to gain wealth through political arrangements. She saw this parasit‐ ism on every point of the economic spectrum from the beggar to the bureaucrat to the purveyor of crony corporatism. The critical tension between Rand and Christian theology is on human worth. Christians affirm the inherent and very high value of individuals because of their creation in the image of God. Rand val‐ 105
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ues human beings only for their achievements. A person who does not offer value is a leech, a “second rater.” “Atlas Shrugged”, the film, is well worth seeing, both because of the challenge posed by Rand’s worldview and because it avoids the pedantic speech‐making of the overly long novel. Rand doesn’t trust her story to get her philosophy across. The novel struggles under the weight of her desire to teach. Thanks to the constraints of the film medium, we learn through the development of the characters and the plot. As a result, the tale comes through quite clearly and simply. The story proceeds from a fascinating premise: what if the most able were to go on strike and take their gifts away from the broader society (like LeBron James taking his from Cleveland!)? These talent‐ ed individuals stop producing because society (in the form of gov‐ ernment) has begun to take their contribution for granted and seeks to control the conditions under which they live, work, and create. Government action occurs under the rubric of equity, but these people who “move the world”—as one conversation in the film ex‐ presses—do not understand what claim the government has to order their lives or to confiscate the fruits of their labor. The villains of the piece are not so much any welfare class as much as corporatists who want to link their companies to government arrangements so as to assure profit without the need for strong performance. They go on about loyalty and public service, but it is a mask for mediocrity and greed. The heroes want to make money, too—but they are virtuous because they give obvious value for every cent they earn. The underlying moral is that we must not make too great a claim to control the inventors and entrepreneurs lest we frustrate them into inactivity. Though some think we gain by taxing and regulating their efforts, we stand to lose a great deal more by blocking the creative impulse and inspiring a parasitic ethic of entitlement. Rand’s atheism, materialism, and reduction of the human being’s value to economic productivity are all severely problematic for a va‐ riety of good reasons. But one might compare her political and eco‐ nomic thought to chemotherapy, which is basically a form of poison designed to achieve a positive outcome. You don’t want to take it if you can avoid it. You hope the circumstances in which you would use it don’t arise. However, in an age of statism, it is a message that may need to be heard. Not so much in the hopes that it will prevail as 106
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much as to see it arrest movement in a particular direction which will end badly if it continues.
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n the context of discussions about “budgets as moral docu‐ ments”, it’s worth considering the final moments of the budget deal this Spring that went right up to the brink of a government shutdown. To those friends of mine who are also Christians, but identify more with the left than the right, I have a question for you: Just exactly what hill was it the Democrats decided they wanted to die on in this battle? Where did they draw the line and say, “This far and no further!”? It turns out their one adamantine point of no compromise was... funding for Planned Parenthood. Wow, that’s a real Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment. Not that this should come as a surprise. How many Democrat figures have been down this path and learned that they have to make a choice? Ted Kennedy was pro‐life and was forced by his party’s realities to change. Jesse Jackson was pro‐life. Same result. Ditto for one Albert Gore. There is one orthodoxy in the party of the left that will not brook disagreement. I suspect Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are feeling a little uncom‐ fortable as they review the bidding. Then again, maybe not.
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allis and a number of other Christians involved in politics were trying to gain attention for the question, “What would Jesus cut?” The answer to this question is supposed to be as obvious as it is in other moral contexts. For example, would Jesus lie about the useful life of a refrigerator he was selling for Best Buy? No way. Would he bully a kid into giving away his lunch mon‐ ey? Not a chance. Would you find him taking in the show at a strip club on interstate 40 in Arkansas? Unlikely to the extreme. Would he agree to a 2% cut in the marginal tax rate for income made above $250,000? Would he ever accept a cut in welfare spend‐ ing? Those take a little more thought. Wallis and others think it’s a no‐brainer. Let us reason together. 107
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Wallis complains that some Republicans want to cut domestic spending and international aid, while they support an increase in military spending. The implication is that this is obviously a sub‐ Christian position. But is it? Probably the most essential purpose of government is to protect the life and freedom of citizens. The gov‐ ernment achieves this goal through military means. Unless one takes the position that Christianity implies corporate pacificism, then it is unclear the Republicans have blundered according to Christian eth‐ ics. Now, match the question of military spending versus interna‐ tional aid and/or domestic spending. Are the latter obviously superi‐ or to the former? No. It depends on not only what the stated objective is for the different types of spending, but whether they actually achieve their purposes. To simply state that the Republicans want to bolster military spending while cutting international aid and domes‐ tic spending is to achieve nothing at all by way of an indictment. Wallis also complains bitterly that tax cuts to the wealthiest Ameri‐ cans add billions to the deficit. He is referring to the extension of George W. Bush’s cuts in the marginal tax rates that existed under Bill Clinton. The first question I have is how does Jim Wallis know that the level of taxation was just to begin with? And why take Bill Clin‐ ton’s tax levels as the Platonic form of taxation? Maybe they were too high or too low. The highest marginal tax rates have fluctuated dras‐ tically in the United States during the last century. John F. Kennedy made a big cut, with impressive economic effects, as did Ronald Reagan. Is Wallis sure that by cutting taxes those men robbed the poor and gave to the rich? Maybe a lot of poor people got jobs be‐ cause of them. And we aren’t even getting into the question of whether rich people actually have an enhanced duty to pay taxes. If there is a community need, is it righteous to grab a rich person and employ the power of legal coercion to extract the needed funds? Still another problem with this redistributionist attitude about tax‐ es and spending is that it assumes a zero sum state of affairs. For example, one could assume that the most people would be better off under a system like the old Soviet Union that spread resources out to citizens in a way that prized equality of rations. The United States system didn’t do that nearly as much. But which of the two systems provided a better life for people? The answer is easy. The United States and its emphasis on liberty did. Why? A more free economic system produces far more wealth than an unfree one. If your equality 108
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system produces a little, bitty pie, it may give you philosophical sat‐ isfaction, but it doesn’t do as much actual good for people as the sys‐ tem that prizes free productivity and success over equality. Wallis is worried about things like fairness and, of course, about helping people. But the reasoning he employs in doing so assumes that federal programs actually achieve what they set out to do, which is far from obvious, and that they don’t create incentives for behavior that results in greater problems, which often happens. He also as‐ sumes a zero sum society. It is entirely possible that economic think‐ ing that concerns itself more with productivity than with equality will actually leave the great majority of people better off.
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he job you try to get as you graduate from college is likely to be the hardest one to obtain for the next twenty or so years of your life. It is doubly hard when you are trying to get that job in a time of high unemployment. This is the moment at which you are an unknown. At college, we attempt to prepare you for real life. Papers and tests are proxies for projects and tasks to be completed. If you can do the one, you can probably do the other, but no one can be sure. At this point in your life, employers are looking at you like a player in a sports draft. Is this student going to be a star or a bust? Will they re‐ gret having brought you on board? Are you the person who will fig‐ ure things out or endlessly look for direction? Many “A” students will despair of finding out how they should use their gifts, while a number of less successful students will plug right into a job, feel im‐ mense relief at the end of homework, and start cranking out useful performance immediately. Once you have taken your first professional job, you will be more of a known quantity and (if you are good) subsequent jobs will be easier to find. Here’s my advice for getting through this time: 1. Don’t rush into a career and take advantage of EVERY job you hold. Don’t worry that you are determining the rest of your life. I had a job in a local drugstore right out of college that helped me save money and taught me a lot about working. If you keep your mind active, you can benefit from every work experience. Think about how the operation runs. Try to understand things from the manager or 109
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owner’s point of view. Work on doing what your boss needs you to do. Take satisfaction in the completed task. I can remember feeling good about a freshly mopped floor or a clean toilet. Today, I have that same feeling when I give a good lecture or write a good article. 2. Be curious about the people above you. In saying this, I absolute‐ ly do not mean that you should be a suck‐up. People see through that. What I mean is that you can find your way by learning about the experiences and decisions of your bosses and senior employees. View their lives as stories VERY relevant to your own. NOTHING has benefitted me more in my working life than asking questions about the lives and careers of co‐workers and superiors. It can back‐ fire, as it did on me once when a female boss (many years ago) began weeping as I probed recent professional events, but the other 97% of experiences have been very positive. 3. Avoid the accumulation of consumer and housing debt when you are young. You need to be able to move. You need to be able to change jobs. You need to be able to return to school if you decide you want a different career. Travel light. You are still figuring out who you are and what you want to be. 4. Learn how to sustain attention away from electronics. In the fu‐ ture, the person who is able to devote their attention to the substance of a meeting and contribute meaningfully is going to look like a su‐ perstar.
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hile visiting my grandmother’s home for her 95th birthday a little evening television surfing brought us to “House Hunters International”. We observed with fascination as a couple living in New Orleans worked toward their move to the French countryside. The husband was a professional trumpeter ap‐ parently making money on the side as a carpenter. The wife was identified as a dancer of some sort. While we heard the husband pop out a few bars of “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In” on a couple of occasions, the wife did not provide any sort of evidence of her spin‐ ning and twirling chops. They had a young son and seemed to have a friendly community of pals in the Big Easy. During the episode, we discovered that the wife was French and that was part of the motivation for making the move to France, but 110
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the big draw, enthusiastically embraced by the husband, was that “Everything is free there!” He went on to mention health care as an example. The first thing that comes to mind is that this young fellow needs an immediate short course in Robert Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch). Someone is paying, my friend. Now, maybe it’s a rich guy. I don’t know. Does the rich guy owe this couple free healthcare? Or then again, maybe they will pay for it after all. Maybe they’ll pay in taxes. Maybe they’ll pay in other ways than money. Maybe they’ll pay with things like time and DMV‐style in‐ convenience. The second thing that occurs to me is that policymakers in France can’t be very happy with developments like this. A young couple with no certain way to make a living is moving to their country to take advantage of “free” things like healthcare. What great news! The word “sustainability” applies to things other than the envi‐ ronment, after all.
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y pastor, Ben Mandrell of Englewood Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee, plans to preach the sermon next week, but he couldn’t help but give a preview in the form of a few examples. Here are some approximations of what he said:
Lord, that family down the street seems really lonely. Send someone to give them company and fellowship. Lord, that boy seems not to have a father. Put someone in his life to fill that need. Lord, that single mother in my Sunday school class appears to be in real financial distress. A few hundred dollars would make a real difference for her. Father, please provide for her need. Probably most of you reading these examples are already smiling. You see the problem, don’t you? The very fact that we have observed a real need in another person or group of persons likely means that we are the ones God intends to meet that need. Can you be the one who invites the lonely family over to your house? Can you offer to spend time with the boy who has no father? 111
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Can you be the one who has the resources on hand to immediately and dramatically help the single mother in financial need? Can you do it even if you won’t realize a tax deduction in the process? This is a spiritual challenge that we are generally not eager to ac‐ cept. If we decide to live our lives in such a way that we are very sen‐ sitive to God’s promptings, we may give more than we really want to give. We may end up with lots of little incursions on our time or our money. Maybe some big ones. But do we seriously believe God can be pleased with us if we do not commit to this way of life?
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ocial leveling is something that we typically associate with the destruction of material differences between human beings. It is the socialist dream of a classless society in which distinctions, usually the result of economic variation, are made irrelevant. The state, empowered by the political action of the masses (or at least a group claiming to speak for the masses), works to gain control of the wealth and property of a society and then to redistribute it in such a way as to make people equal. It should be obvious that this type of action vastly increases the power of the state because it becomes the effective owner of all property. Although socialism aims to wipe out material inequality, it may merely present a new opportunity for sin. James Madison noted that taking control of the property in a state will not make people equal for more than a very short time. They have different talents, abilities, and levels of energy. A new elite will assert itself, just as it has in eve‐ ry nation with a communist revolution. While there have been Christian socialists, socialism has primarily been the province of secularists. I suspect that is because while it easy to understand how Christians could endorse a voluntary sharing of all property, it is harder to see them endorse the kind of involuntary sharing which a more blunt person might refer to as coercive confis‐ cation legitimized by government power. Augustine thought in this way when he pictured some governments as bands of robbers with official uniforms of state. There is another reason why Christians are unlikely to embrace social leveling. The logic of social leveling applies to more than prop‐ erty. Indeed, socialism and secularism are closely related to one an‐ 112
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other. While socialism seeks to erase the economic distinctions be‐ tween human beings by taking individual choices about property out of peopleʹs hands, secularism seeks to erase the religious differences between people by making religion irrelevant to the life of the com‐ munity. This action of secularism, so similar to socialism, is why I refer to it as a type of social leveling. Social leveling has a degree of appeal. The idea is that people will be made equal because equality is a goal worth striving for. The great problem in applying social leveling to property and/or economic achievement is that it takes no cognizance of merit or virtue and thus diminishes the value of both. Social leveling applied to religion may be worse because it pays no attention to the possibility of religious truth. All religious propositions are treated as utterly unprovable revelation fit primarily for the credulous. This presents a special problem for Christians who believe that their faith is really true and that there is evidence to support it in real space and time. One should not be surprised that secularists view Christianity as a psychological crutch. Social leveling in the form of secularism does faithfully treat all religions the same. They become equally private and equally segre‐ gated from the life of the community. Secularists, of course, hope that religion will eventually fade away as human beings embrace their equality with each other. Empiricism tends to run in a different direc‐ tion. If there is equality among human beings, it is equality before God who has placed his image upon all of us. I have argued that social leveling achieves a wrong result in the sense that it ignores things like merit and virtue in the form of social‐ ism, and truth in the form of secularism. That alone is good reason to oppose it, but there is a bigger problem than that. The social leveling that is achieved by socialism and secularism can only be engineered by one entity in a society. That entity is the state. Thus, the state will become the effective owner of all property and the state will deter‐ mine what manifestations of religion (if any) are acceptable to itself. If we empower the state to this degree, then the state effectively dictates reality and tends to move in the direction of totalitarianism. It is notable that the Marxist dream of human brotherhood rooted in universal equality stalled out repeatedly at the dictatorship stage without any probable movement forward to the ʺwithering away of the stateʺ as Marx predicted. This tendency toward dictatorship 113
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among nations opting for radical brotherhood seems to confirm the American foundersʹ view of the human being and to disconfirm Marxʹs view. In other words, the suspicion of power fostered by a Christian awareness of human sinfulness is a more realistic ap‐ proach. That suspicion led the American founders to build a system which makes dictatorship or the functional equivalent extraordinari‐ ly difficult to achieve. The twentieth century was the century par excellence for social level‐ ing. At no other time in history was there so much energy behind experiments in government on a massive scale. It was the most dan‐ gerous century the world has known because it married the greatest political ambition with the greatest technological achievement. Though the close of the 20th century saw the threat of totalitarianism blunted, we must understand the part enthusiasm for social leveling played in its rise. And we must continue to oppose it as it returns with ever softer and friendlier faces.
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uth and I were talking to our children about money. We ex‐ plained how you give some it away to people who need it. You buy some things. You save some of it for when you need it. It occurred to me that I really should explain taxes. I told the kids that I would first have to give some of the money to the government. It isn’t even a choice. When I get money the government gets to take some of it. Grace (then age 5) was astonished. She said, “If I have to go to the government, then I’m just going to sit really still and not say any‐ thing.” I asked her what she meant. She said, “When I go see Mr. Government, I’ll just be very quiet and not make any noise. I won’t tell him anything. Because I don’t want him to steal all my money.” Out of the mouths of babes, as they say.
Hunter Baker is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Union University. He is the author of The End of Secularism (Crossway Books). You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com. 114
The Word
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THE CITY
4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ John Henry Newman In each volume of T HE C I T Y , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. In 1852, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) delivered a series of nine discourses on the nature of a Christian liberal arts university to help lay the groundwork for a proposed Catholic University in Ireland. The project failed, but the discourses were later published as The Idea of a University. In the discourses (especially the seventh, from which the below passages are taken), Newman distinguishes between the kind of narrow, “practical” education offered at a vocational school and the more wide-ranging, well-rounded education offered at a liberal-arts university. At the former, students are equipped only to perform a certain trade; at the latter, they are taught to think critically about a number of different topics, not just those in their “major.”
I
have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasona‐ bly be pursued for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what that cultivation consists in. Truth of what‐ ever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employ‐ ment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is neces‐ sarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attend‐ ing many lectures... This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its 116
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own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education . . . Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction ʺuseful,ʺ and ʺUtilityʺ becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called ʺa Liberal Educa‐ tion” ... I say, let us take ʺusefulʺ to mean, not what is simply good, but what tends to good, or is the instrument of good; and in this sense also, Gentlemen, I will show you how a liberal education is truly and fully a useful, though it be not a professional, education. ʺGoodʺ in‐ deed means one thing, and ʺusefulʺ means another; but I lay it down as a principle, which will save us a great deal of anxiety, that, though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful. Good is not only good, but reproductive of good; this is one of its attributes; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable for its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself all around it. Good is prolific; it is not only good to the eye, but to the taste; it not only at‐ tracts us, but it communicates itself; it excites first our admiration and love, then our desire and our gratitude, and that, in proportion to its intenseness and fulness in particular instances. A great good will impart great good. If then the intellect is so excellent a portion of us, and its cultivation so excellent, it is not only beautiful, perfect, admirable, and noble in itself, but in a true and high sense it must be useful to the possessor and to all around him; not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or a treasure, first to the owner, then through him to the world. I say then, if a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too. But I must bring these extracts to an end. Today I have confined myself to saying that that training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society. The Philosopher, indeed, and the man of the world differ in 117
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their very notion, but the methods, by which they are respectively formed, are pretty much the same. The Philosopher has the same command of matters of thought, which the true citizen and gentle‐ man has of matters of business and conduct. If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular profes‐ sions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal au‐ thors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its pre‐ cincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordi‐ nary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellec‐ tual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and so‐ briety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an elo‐ quence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an un‐ derstanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend 118
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upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be seri‐ ous with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man all this, is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its result.
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