360 Review

Energy, Agriculture, Finance, Culture & Faith on the Northern Great Plains

SUMMER/FALL 2016 • VOLUME 1.2 • UNIVERSITY OF MARY

360 REVIEW magazine covers energy, agriculture, finance, culture and faith on the Northern Great Plains. 360 Review presents in-depth inquiry, analysis and reflection on important issues, trends and events happening in and affecting this region. There is a special focus on North Dakota, where we are located. More stories about surrounding states will published in future issues.

“Magazine” derives from makhazin, the Arabic word for “storehouse,” which also soon gained military application as a “store for arms.” The world’s first print magazines began publication in England in the 18th century and sought to provide a storehouse of information and intellectual armament.

360 Review joins that tradition with the Christian, Catholic and Benedictine tradition of the University of Mary, which exists to serve the religious, academic and cultural needs of people in this region and beyond.

As a poet once wrote: “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.”

360 Review strives to tell some of these stories well—on paper (made of atoms, we presume), which is retro-innovative in a world spinning into cyberspace. There is also a digital version, available at: www.umary.edu/360.

Publisher: University of Mary Editor-in-Chief: Patrick J. McCloskey Art Director & Photographer: Jerry Anderson Director of Print & Media Marketing: Tom Ackerman Illustrator: Tom Marple Research & Graphics Assistant: Matthew Charley Editorial Offices: University of Mary, 7500 University Drive, Bismarck, ND 58504 Signed articles express the views of their authors and are intended solely to inform and broaden public debate. They are not intended to aid or hinder legislation before legislative bodies at the municipal, state or federal level.

© 360 Review at the University of Mary Printed in Canada

Table of Contents

The board is set, the pieces are now in motion, at last we come to it—the great battle of our age.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Letters to 360 Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 [Technology] Drones Illustrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 [Technology] Drone “Coincidenzas:” Marilyn, Reagan & North Dakota . . . 6 [Military] A Generals Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 [Commentary] Closer to the Robo-Rubicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 [Art] Waxing & Waning of Light: Mike Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 [Culture] Tribe, Time & Trait: German-Russians on the Prairie . . . . . . . . 48 [Economic Diversity] Winnebago & the Flying W(in) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 [Benedictine] Walker Percy: Novelist as Cultural Physician & Oblate . . .70 [Bioethics] Multi-Parent Children? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 [Essay] Where is the Wisdom We Have Lost in Knowledge? . . . . . . . . . . . 79 [Education] Educating Students in Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90 [Geopolitics] Why No Peace in the Middle East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 [Book Review] Breaking the Line: Football, Civil Rights & Civility . . . . 109 [Book Review] Mercy in the City (& Town & Country) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 [Movie Review] Fargo Movie & TV Series and The Revenant . . . . . . . . . 120 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Great Plains Cartoon Caption Contest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 1

Letters to the Editor

“Iron Link” between energy consumption and standard of living?

It’s amusing to see the old “iron link” between energy consumption and standard of living resurrected. The leadership of the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) believed firmly in the link between electricity consumption and quality of life. That was their rationale for predicting a future with thousands of nuclear reactors dotting the U.S., and they had decades of data supporting that assumption. Fortunately, what they were interpreting as an iron link was short-term elasticity. Because of the nature of our energy infrastructure, it has a short-term elasticity close to zero. However, events since the early 1970s have clearly shown that our energy system’s long-term elasticity is considerably higher.

There is a major omission in Mills’ analysis: the economic externalities of continuing reliance on fossil fuels to power modern society. If we are forced to begin removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at rates comparable to its rate of release, in order to mitigate the increasingly destructive effects of global warming on the frequency and severity of natural disasters, on sea levels, etc., then it will substantially reduce the net efficiency and increase the societal cost of conventional technology. It would be very interesting to see if Mills’ conclusions would be altered if he included this in his analysis.

David F. Salisbury Senior Research Writer, Vanderbilt University

Response: Mark Mills There is just no evidence that the global link between energy consumption and economic growth has ended. It is, by the way, a “golden” and not iron link for the billions of people in emerging economies who seek to rise to even a fraction of the lifestyle casually enjoyed by the one billion people in mature economies. Of course as economies mature, the character of the link changes: Mature nations can experience economic growth rates higher than electric growth rates—the inverse of poor nations. But the link remains. And even seemingly trivial growth rates of 1 percent, or a fraction of a percent per year in big economies, creates an incremental increase in energy demands that exceed the total national demands of smaller economies. As for the notion that the “iron” link traces its roots to the old AEC, that organization was far from alone in citing the linkage. And they were right.

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It is a standard shibboleth to cite environmental “externalities” as if they are not priced into the use of hydrocarbons. With the exception of carbon dioxide (well, until the contentious Clean Power Plan), the entire purpose is to internalize the costs associated with a legion of environmental regulations. As for carbon dioxide, I have written elsewhere but note here briefly, that whatever the merits or accuracy of increasingly hyperbolic claims about global warming, the immutable fact is that the world gets 85 percent of all energy from burning hydrocarbons. Over the past two decades, hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for alternative energy have not changed that fact.

There is simply not enough money nor any credible way with existing technologies by which the world can replace hydrocarbons at the scale and price that matters. I am in good company with this observation—none other than Bill Gates has recently and repeatedly observed the same reality.

The writer is correct, though—if “we are forced to begin removing carbon dioxide,” it would change my analysis. I would then focus on the staggering economic destruction of civilization.

Journalism, Information & Democracy Thank you for reinstating a depth to journalism that is so lacking in today’s world of media soundbites. 360 Review is a refreshing look at the cultural, economic, religious and geopolitical dimensions that make our Northern Great Plains great. Your deep dives allow your readers to engage in meaningful discussions and even take action on issues important to them.

While reading 360 Review, I was struck by the similarity to an online endeavor I founded last fall, TheChisel.com, where we delve into public policy issues important to Americans and to the country’s future. Just as you are combating the decay of investigative journalism, we are heeding our Chief Inspiration Officer Ben Franklin’s admonition: “What have you done with our Great American Experiment?”

Ben Franklin has much in common with our Northern Great Plains—a spirit of entrepreneurship, innovation and invention, statesmanship, scholarship, independence, and patriotism. Most importantly, he represents the tie that binds together disparate ideas, fusing them into a cohesive, flourishing whole.

At TheChisel.com, we are taking back our democracy by giving citizens a unique platform to engage in public policy-making with experts from nonpartisan organizations and multi-partisan coalitions. Then we’ll help send proposals to Congress. This project can succeed only if Americans are properly informed, to which 360 Review is making a significant contribution.

Deborah L. Devedjian Founder & Chief Citizens’ Officer, TheChisel.com

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S E NTI N E L R Q - 1 8 0

Drones illustrated

Use: Strategic Intelligence Gathering Max Altitude: Est. 40-60,000 ft Wingspan: Est. 130-165 ft Range: Est. 1,400-2,400 miles Top Speed: Classified

DRONE EXPLOSION The FAA rushed to have regulations in place before Christmas of 2015 to address the increase in consumer drones. Drones are being used increasingly in the energy, agricultural, sports, science and entertainment sectors.

I N S ITU S C A N E AG LE

Use: Military, Commercial Surveillance Max Altitude: 19,500 ft Wingspan: 10.2 ft Range: 1,500 miles Top Speed: 92 mph Pilots are trained at the University of North Dakota

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HERMES 450 Use: Military, Commercial Surveillance Max Altitude: 18,000 ft Wingspan: 34 ft Range: 125 miles Top Speed: 109 mph

G P S S ATE LLITE S Drones link to the 32 Global Positioning System satellites to navigate and carry out missions.

G LO B A L H AW K Use: Military Surveillance Max Altitude: 60,000 ft Wingspan: 131 ft Range: 14,000 miles Top Speed: 357 mph

REAPER Use: Military Surveillance/Attack Max Altitude: 50,000 ft Wingspan: 66 ft Range: 1,150 miles Top Speed: 276 mph

A R PA R R OT Use: Consumer Max Altitude: 328 ft Wingspan: 2.4 ft Range: Within Sight Top Speed: 25 mph

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Drone “Coincidenzas:” Marilyn, Reagan & North Dakota Grand Forks has become “Silicon Valley for Drones” for military and commercial applications Mark Mills Author, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute, and Faculty Fellow, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering 6

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hat do Marilyn Monroe, President Ronald Reagan and Grand Forks, North Dakota, have in common? For the cognoscenti of historical coincidences and convergences, the answer is drones.

Let’s start with a remarkable World War II era photograph (above right) of 18-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty, aka Marilyn Monroe, in which she is holding a propeller at the company where she worked, appropriately named Radioplane, that built drones in Burbank, California, which were used as targets in training anti-aircraft gunners. That photograph, part of a “Rosie the Riveter” photographic campaign, was instrumental in getting Norma Jeane noticed in Hollywood.

The “Rosie the Riveter” propaganda campaign was launched in 1942 to convince women to join the workforce to replace the large numbers of men who were joining the armed services. By 1943, women constituted 65 percent of the aircraft industry’s workforce, compared to 1 percent before the war.

And the coincidence? According to historian Michael Beschloss, the officer responsible for assigning that photographer was Captain Ronald Reagan who, because of poor eyesight, was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces in Culver City, California.

To follow the trail further: It was during the Reagan Administration in 1984 that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a brilliant aviation inventor, Abraham Karem, who built the Amber drone

Above right, Norma Jeane Dougherty (née Mortenson) posing in the WWII photo promotion that launched her movie star career as Marilyn Monroe. She worked 10 hours a day on the Radioplane drone assembly line for $20 per week.

Center, Mark Hastings (right), Chief Pilot of UND’s UAS program, conducts a preflight inspection of the Insitu ScanEagle with student Andrew Schill.

Opposite left, Capt. Ronald Reagan during WWII. He served with the U.S. military’s film unit under Lt. Col. Jack Warner (President of Warner Bros. Studios).

The unit produced over 300 training and propaganda films, as well as three million feet of combat footage.

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Though [drones] had been used … since World War II, they were revolutionized in 1995. The Gnat … carried something new: video cameras. … The Gnat gave commanders a 60-mile panorama [and] could stay airborne more or less permanently. Later renamed the Predator, it quickly became the U.S. military’s preferred surveillance tool.

Mark Bowden “How the Predator Drone Changed the Nature of War,” Smithsonian Magazine 8

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that would, just 10 years later, become the General Atomics Predator drone.

And, full circle, Grand Forks Air Force Base has become an all-drone operations airbase and a catalyst for North Dakota to emerge, as the New York Times headlined it, “A Silicon Valley for Drones,” on Christmas Day last year.

We can extend this connection of “coincidenzas” (to borrow a word made famous by 1980s Saturday Night Live comedian Don Novello, who played the fictional “Father” Guido Sarducci). President Reagan’s son, Ronald Prescott Reagan, was born in 1958, the same year that the U.S. military created DARPA, and the same year that the 4133d Strategic Wing at Grand Forks, North Dakota, was established.

Grand Forks & the Drone Economy Out of Grand Forks today, airmen fly Reaper Predator B and Northrop Grumman Global Hawk drones on missions from northern Canada to Texas and South America for the military and for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Predator in particular has come to epitomize a transformation both in warfare and civilian applications. Military drones are not new. The first one dates back to the dawn of aviation with a Navy program and a successful flight off Long Island in 1916. The program was shelved because the technology wasn’t ready for prime time. It would take 70 years before Abraham Karem would demonstrate, under the DARPA contract noted above, that the technology was finally ripe for the military.

Then it only took 15 years, following the launch of the Predator program, to see the release of the small-appliance-sized Parrot, arguably the first viable consumer drone, which was unveiled at the 2010 annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Parrot, built by French company AR.Drone, was followed quickly by the 2013 introduction of the easy-to-use Phantom, a GPS-enabled drone from DJI, a five-year-old Chinese start-up.

In the handful of years since then, civilian drone demand has grown explosively with about one million sold last year alone in the U.S. (though many of those are still in the toy class). “Drone-mania” and an accompanying “dronephobia” have now spread across the national landscape. Regulations, litigation, news, entertainment and, perhaps most importantly, new businesses are proliferating, using the drone as a new class of tool and consumer appliance.

Welcome to the drone economy. Its various aspects already comprise an $11-billion industry, including military uses that still account for 80 percent of the market, giving North Dakota some early advantages. The overall market is forecast to increase 10-fold in less than a decade.

The scale and inevitable growth of the drone industry has spurred more than controversy; it has already led to entirely new kinds of jobs and collaterally, the need for new kinds of drone-centric training and education. Given the history of the state, it should be unsurprising that the University of North Dakota (UND) ranks amongst the top 15 drone training colleges in

An MQ-9 Reaper Predator B from U.S. Customs and Border Protection awaits permission to launch, while another Predator B performs a touch-and-go maneuver at Grand Forks Air Force Base. The two Predator Bs are the first remotely piloted aircraft allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly simultaneously in the same unrestricted airspace.

U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Xavier Navarro

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Chief Pilot Mark Hastings carries the Insitu ScanEagle back to its storage case. The ScanEagle is launched from a pneumatic catapult and then caught in a rope skyhook, since it has no landing wheels. The ScanEagle can be deployed almost anywhere since the launcher and skyhook are readily transported on land or by water.

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America. The other 14 colleges on the list, by the way, are all located in states that are typically given the “fly-over� label: Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Indiana State Universities, to name a few. This might not be surprising given that some of the most immediately and powerfully useful applications for drones are found in industry, agriculture, utilities of all kinds, and in oil and gas businesses from the wellhead and pipelines to the refineries.

Drones & the Energy Market In the circles of coincidences, it so happens that among the many drone markets, few are as intriguing and compelling as those in nearly every aspect of the energy industry, from windmills and transmission lines to oil fields.

Drones can be used to facilitate operations, maintenance, and exploration and surveys for all manner of energy (and infrastructure) projects. Their greatest immediate benefit may come from productively and radically reducing the costs of compliance with the blizzard of governmental safety and environmental regulations.

Oil and gas companies spend nearly $40 billion a year on compliance.

Powerful information-centric Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been credited with cutting compliance costs by 10 percent. ERP systems, promoted by companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, also include hundreds of specialty firms that focus on obtaining ever-better data.

Drones now open the possibility of profound improvements in real-time

information about the myriad of hard-to-see or hard-to-measure aspects of these complex and sprawling energy enterprises. Drones can thus offer another way to produce oil and gas profitably at lower prices—to reduce the benefits to a key metric. The same is true across many industrial and agricultural applications.

In fact, a new Goldman Sachs analysis sees drones as critical to enabling precision agriculture. The demand for drone hardware and services for farming is expected to become the second biggest drone market in the near future, just behind military and security applications.

Drones & Energy Consumption

Ben Trapnell, an Associate Professor at UND’s Department of Aviation, oversees the initial test flight for a multi-rotor drone built

by Jonathan Olson, the student operating it.

Each student built an unmanned aircraft and wrote a paper about a possible mission for the drone.

Drones have another energy feature that has been largely ignored. As with all radically new technologies, eventual ubiquity leads to more energy consumption.

How so? Everything uses energy and the law of big numbers applies. If you do lots of anything, you will consume lots of energy. In this case, a salient fact is that all flying machines consume more energy per pound than any other mode of transportation. Flying is usually far more convenient and a faster way to get information or move things. But in the physics of engineered systems, convenience and speed come with an energy cost.

The energy implications of drones are revealed by looking at how they’ll be used. For now, we can ignore drones that someday might transport 11

Architect’s rendering of Grand Sky, the nation’s first drone business and aviation park. Access to the runways at Grand Forks Air Force Base will accelerate the introduction of large commercial drones into national airspace. Grand Sky offers 1.2 million sq. ft. of hanger, office, shop, laboratory and data center space on a build-to-suit basis. (Courtesy Grand Sky Development Co.) 12

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humans since that entails a substantially more difficult technological and critically, regulatory hurdle. In the meantime, drones are already technically and commercially viable for two generic civilian tasks: first, carrying stuff (whether Amazon packages or precision fertilizer) or collecting information (whether geophysical exploration or crop health surveys). The second category encompasses purely entertainment uses, which are also information-centric—from follow-me-skiing or wedding videos to drone racing (via virtual reality headsets), to note a few examples in a rapidly expanding consumer cornucopia.

Let’s consider first the use of drones for carrying stuff. Here, batterypowered drones are generally not useful since they are typically limited to small payloads (a pound or two), short flight times (minutes, not hours) and low speeds (well below 30 mph). These present severe limitations for myriads of commercial and industrial applications.

Drones carrying real payloads for long periods or at useful speeds incur high energy costs.

It’s in the physics—everywhere and always, whether shuttling goods or dusting crops. The Predator drone, for example, typifies what nature dictates: It is powered by a 100-horsepower, four-cylinder engine of a type typically used in snowmobiles.

Fuel-burning engines will dominate heavy lifting for drones because oil stores 40 times more energy per pound than batteries. Fuel cells come close to matching the energy density of engines, while operating as quietly as batteries. Even though fuel cells are expensive, they will become a go-to power source for the dual goals of heavy-lift and quiet operation. But there is still no ‘free lunch’ on the energy front. While the universe is dominated by hydrogen, the Earth is not. We obtain 95 percent of the hydrogen used today (for industrial processes and rockets) from natural gas. So one way or another, heavy-lift and long-range drones will be shale-powered.

Some drones will be gasoline hybrids, similar to cars. One German inventor has already designed a hybrid gasoline-burning consumer drone that can carry 12 pounds of cargo and fly for an hour at 60 mph.

Israeli Drone Flies North Dakota’s Friendly Skies

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n February, a trade mission organized by the North Dakota Trade Office (NDTO) journeyed to Israel to seek import-export and investment opportunities for the state. As a result, Elbit Systems, Inc., an international hightech company headquartered in Haifa, which focuses on defense and homeland security, will be conducting agricultural research with North Dakota State University (NDSU), beginning this summer.

Throughout the growing season, Elbit is using its Hermes 450, a large fixed-wing drone, to study a test plot of farmland—40 miles long and 4 miles wide—near Cooperstown, North Dakota. The imaging technology on the Hermes allows the drone to fly high and cover large swaths of land as it generates infrared, thermal, color and multi-spectral images.

“Then very rapidly, the Hermes will provide data to growers about emerging diseases, beneficial pesticides, weed growth and reseeding opportunities,” said Lt. Governor Drew H. Wrigley in an interview.

“Precision agriculture allows growers to make timely reactive and proactive decisions that will increase yield.”

Wrigley, who chairs NDTO, is encouraging Elbit to “expand their footprint into North Dakota at Grand Sky and consider venturing into the energy sector, disaster emergency response and infrastructure inspection.”

Three years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration chose North Dakota as one of six official drone test sites nationwide. At Grand

Forks Air Force Base (GFAFB), the USAF, Air National Guard and border patrol pilot drones on surveillance and other classified missions.

Located at GFAFB is Grand Sky, the nation’s first unmanned aerial systems (UAS) business and aviation park, where companies and government agencies can test unmanned aircraft in a wide range of climactic conditions (extreme heat and cold, and low to high wind) in an open airspace.

North Dakota allows drone flights at night and up to 10,000 feet, in contrast to daylight only and

Lt. Governor Drew H. Wrigley and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring beside a Hermes 450 at the Golan Heights test site in Israel.

ceilings as low as 200 feet elsewhere.

Last November, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., which produces Predator Reaper drones, broke ground for a $2.5-million training academy at Grand Sky to train UAS flight crews.

A month earlier, Northrop Grumman, which makes the Global Hawk, broke ground for a 36,000 square-foot facility, which will be used for UAS research and training.

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Using drones for agricultural surveillance has the potential to significantly increase crop yields while reducing costs. Aerial surveys can quickly identify yield problems by monitoring crops for pests and disease, reseeding and fertilizer needs, flood and fire protection, irrigation, and harvesting.

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A comparable battery-powered unit would carry one pound of cargo and fly for only 15 minutes. Many similar types of drones will follow that path soon, unleashing a flood of industrial and agricultural uses.

It’s difficult to guestimate the energy that will be consumed by highpowered drones used for novel tasks still not imagined and heretofore impossible in agriculture, industry or commerce. But we can explore a proxy by looking at the widely hyped possibility of package deliveries—the convenience and flexibility of local drone delivery for the megatons of stuff now shipped daily throughout the nation.

One way to get a handle on it is to examine two critical facts: How much stuff is carried in America by trucks (ignoring rail, air and ships), and how much more energy it takes to fly a machine (of any kind) carrying a pound of stuff. For purposes of this ballpark calculation, we will assume that the energy efficiency of drones matches larger conventional aircraft in terms of gallons burned per pound of lift. This is a generous assumption since, again according to the laws of physics, smaller prop blades and quadcopter designs are inherently less efficient. In fact, the power associated with a quadcopter drone’s computer-controlled stability cuts in half the payload it can carry. Of course, turn the stability control off and the drone crashes. All that said, for the sake of a simple estimate, we will assume the tech geniuses in California’s Silicon Valley and North Dakota’s Silicon Drone Fields will

invent clever technology to match conventional aviation efficiency. (It is no coincidence that start-up Packet Digital of Fargo, North Dakota, is one such tech company specializing in drone power management.)

For drones, as for all aircraft, the bottom line is that flying cargo consumes 10-fold more energy per pound-mile than carrying it by truck.

This fact is locked into the existence of gravity and the atmosphere. Now we get to the simple arithmetic. Imagine drones carrying 10 percent of the three trillion ton-miles of truck freight in U.S., which would happen if drones were used to facilitate freighting’s first and last mile. Since 10-fold more energy is used per airborne ton-mile, 10 percent of cargo going by air will use as much total energy as the 90 percent still carried on trucks.

In other words, 10 percent of freight traffic delivered by drones would double the fuel used by U.S. freight trucking, adding 2.5 million barrels per day of oil demand. If the drones all used hydrogen-powered fuel cells, that would require more than the equivalent of 3 million barrels per day in new natural gas demand, which equals a 50-percent increase in total shale output. (It takes energy to make hydrogen, hence the penalty.)

The arithmetic is inexorable: Even a 5-percent market penetration of drones carrying freight drives a 50-percent increase in oil for freight shipping. Just a 1-percent penetration pushes freight oil use up at least 10 percent.

For drones, as for all aircraft, the bottom line is that flying cargo consumes 10-fold energy per pound-mile than carrying it by truck.

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However, long before drones carry significant freight in the first and last mile of delivery, they will carry the weight equivalent of at least 1 percent of freight for other industrial and agriculture applications, which will require an additional 250,000 to 300,000 barrels of oil per day—or, to provide relevant context, over one-fourth of the Bakken’s current output.

Battery Powered Drones

Since 10-fold more energy is used per airborne ton-mile, 10 percent of cargo going by air (drones) will use as much total energy as the 90 percent still carried on trucks.

Meanwhile, well before drones start carrying freight or its equivalent in tonnage, there are plenty of other uses for the millions of low-power, battery-propelled drones. Using drones to gather and transmit data and images is light work in energy terms, and battery power is up to many tasks.

In energy terms, even 50 million civilian drones of the Parrot or Phantom class wouldn’t consume as much electricity as roughly that of many laptop PCs (which have comparably sized lithium batteries). Here, the big-picture energy implications from ubiquitous use is not in the specific appetite of a drone’s propulsion system, but in the tsunami of data that drone information systems will add to the Internet.

In general, the energy demand implications from drones are analogous to the history of computing itself. Mainframe computers, although powerful, were economically hobbled by their cost, scale and inefficiency. The post1980s rise of ubiquitous computing is now familiar history; collapsing microprocessor prices and soaring functionality led to computers everywhere, not just in every business of every size, but on every student desktop and in every consumer pocket and purse.

The singular achievement of computer engineers has been to radically increase the distribution of computing power. But the combination of so much more computing in use, along with so many new and imaginative uses for computing, has resulted in an astonishing increase in energy used: Globally, computing today uses more energy than commercial aviation, which accounts for about 12 percent of transportation energy consumed worldwide. That was an outcome few anticipated.

Data Tsunami Which brings us to the data deluge drones will create. Imagine, for example, only 5 percent of households uploading 10 minutes of drone video once a week to the Cloud. That much additional data traffic is equal to the current total mobile Internet traffic.

Odds are, though, that the drone data flood will come sooner from industrial and commercial applications that use both conventional video and (increasingly) data-intensive, multi-spectral imagers. In America, 60 percent of the kilowatt-hours energizing the Internet’s labyrinth of machinery, which 16

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transports and processes data, come from coal and natural gas.

To this thought experiment we can also add the global energy implications from high-altitude drones that Google and Facebook hope to use to link at least a billion more people to the Internet. (Those drones can be solar powered because there are no clouds in the stratosphere and the payload comprises radios and bytes, not cargo or people.) More people on the Internet means more data by definition, which a priori means more electricity consumed to keep the Web lit. Even green-heavy forecasts assume that about 60 percent of new global electricity supply will come from coal and natural gas. It is relevant as well to note that in emerging markets, a significant share of land-based mobile networks are powered by oil-fired generators.

Drones, in short, will stimulate, create and drive another global wave of data into the multi-trillion-dollar, gigawatt-hour-consuming Internet infrastructure.

North Dakota Bound The jury is out as to whether the dominant supplier of consumer drones will be found in the U.S. or China, or even in France or Germany. But for the heavy lifting, the odds might tilt towards America. For an idea of what a future heavy-lift drone might look like, check out DARPA’s new design that uses an array of 24 electric fans, powered by a fuel-burning 3 megawatt-hour turbine. For a glimpse at who will design, maintain and operate such drones, we don’t have to look much further than the Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research, Education and Training at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where over $30 million has already been invested to create a national test site for drones.

While North Dakota and Silicon Valley are both on the leading edge of the drone revolution, it is a transformation that impacts every state. The energy implications are intriguing but predictable. We find uncharted territory, however, with the economic, social and security implications. Regarding these issues, one should note that Mark Hagerott, PhD, the Chancellor of North Dakota’s University System and Cyber Fellow at the New America Foundation, is arguably one of the nation’s most forward-thinking analysts.

Hagerott credibly proposes that the constellation of technologies, which drones epitomize, represent one of history’s great transformations.

The circle of coincidences is thus fully closed. Energy and information are inextricably linked. North Dakota is a major player in the emerging drone sector and also in the shale technologies that have transformed global markets.

Perhaps a former Radioplane assembly worker named Marilyn and Captain Ronald Reagan are smiling somewhere—from celestial, gracepowered drones, of course. ±

Drones, in short, will stimulate, create and drive another global wave of data into the multi-trilliondollar, gigawatt-hour consuming Internet infrastructure.

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“Drone-mania” and an accompanying “drone-phobia” have now spread across the national landscape!

“This could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever been programmed to make.”

A FILM BY A.I. HITCHUP A U T O N O M O U S I M A G E P R O D U C T I O N S • WA R N I N G B R O S .

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Military

A Generals Conversation Major General (Ret.) David A. Sprynczynatyk (opposite) and Brigadier General (Ret.) David B. Anderson (above) talk about their careers in the North Dakota National Guard

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his spring, two recently retired generals from the North Dakota National Guard met at the University of Mary to discuss the Guard’s past and future, and reflect on their military careers. Major General David A. Sprynczynatyk retired in December after serving as the Adjutant General of the North Dakota National Guard since August 2006. He oversaw the command

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of all deployments of National Guard soldiers and airmen in the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. Hosting the discussion was Brigadier General David B. Anderson, who is the coordinator for Military Student Services at the University of Mary. Brig. Gen. Anderson retired in 2014 as Commander of the North Dakota Army National Guard.

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HH Major General (Ret.) David A. Sprynczynatyk served as the Adjutant General for the North Dakota National Guard from 2006 through 2015, and then retired with 43 years of service. He commanded 4,100 National Guard soldiers and airmen and also served as the Director of the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, which includes the Division of Homeland Security and the Division of State Radio Communications.

The general’s military service began in 1972 as a photographer with the North Dakota Army National Guard. In 1978, he was commissioned as

Dakota Legion of Merit.

Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk graduated from Wilton High School in Wilton, North Dakota, in 1968 and from North Dakota State University in 1972 with a BS in Civil Engineering. He graduated from the U.S. Army War College in 1998. In 1972, he began working for the State Water Commission and became the State Engineer in 1989. He also served as North Dakota’s Director of Transportation from 2001 to 2006.

Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk is a registered Professional Engineer and served as president of the National Water Resources Association (2001-02).

Currently he serves as president of the Western Association of State Highway Transportation Officials and vice president of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials.

H Brigadier General (Ret.) David B. Anderson

Maj. Gen. David Sprynczynatyk contributed the National Guard perspective to the 2011 Red River Valley flood fight at a Fargo City Commission meeting at Fargo, ND. The 2011 flood in the Fargo area was among the highest in city history.

a first lieutenant and served as the civil engineer, operations officer and company commander for the 164th Engineer Group. In 2000, he became the North Dakota National Guard’s Assistant Adjutant General for Army and then served as the Director of Logistics, National Guard Bureau, from 2003 to 2006, when he became Adjutant General. Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk’s awards and decorations include the Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendation Medal and the Humanitarian Service Medal. His state awards include the North 22

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served as Commander of the North Dakota Army National Guard from 2011 to 2014, after which he retired with 34 years of service.

Brig. Gen. Anderson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1980 and then served in various command assignments, including company and battalion command. The highlight of his military career was deploying the 142nd Engineer Combat Battalion to Iraq from April 2003 to April 2004 as Battalion Commander. He then served as Commander of the 68th Troop Command, Vice Chief of Staff for Operations at Joint Force Headquarters, and Chief of Staff, Army Component. His military awards and decorations include the Federal Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.

In 1979, he graduated from North Dakota State University with a BS in Science and Math and from the U.S. Army War College in 2007 with an MS in Strategic Studies. Brig. Gen. Anderson currently works as the coordinator for Military Student Services at the University of Mary.

H Brig. Gen. Anderson: What are the most significant changes that you’ve seen with the National Guard over your career?

HH Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk: The most important change is the fact that 40 years ago, the National Guard was considered the strategic reserve of the Army and Air Force. That meant we trained for war, but the fact was that we would be called as a last resort to support the active component. Since then, the Guard has been transformed into a truly operational force. You can see the proof since 9/11 in that today’s soldiers and airmen are better equipped and trained—far more prepared to go to war.

And here in North Dakota since 9/11, we’ve actually mobilized and deployed more than 6,800 soldiers and airmen around the world to support the global war on terrorism. Today, we are no longer that strategic reserve.

Forty years ago, the likelihood of being deployed was slim during an individual’s enlistment. Today, when our young men and women join the National Guard, they know with a fair degree of certainty that they’ll deploy at some point during enlistment.

Since 9/11, we’ve deployed thousands of our young men and women, and they’ve done a tremendous job, proving that as a National Guard, as a reserve of the Army and Air Force, we can step right in and carry on the warfight shoulder-to-shoulder with those soldiers, those airmen, who are active 365 days a year.

H Gen. Anderson: I agree, the big change is that now we are an operational force. As the Commander of the 142nd Engineer Battalion in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, I observed the integration—particularly in the engineering realm— of the National Guard with the active forces. We integrated seamlessly, which was a great example of partnership. Certainly the performance of our North Dakota guardsmen was outstanding.

Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk (left) visited with children in Ghana Africa during a State Partnership Program trip in 2008.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: In the early days of the war on terror, as the first units deployed—your battalion, for one—the expectation was that when our soldiers came home, up to half of them would leave the Guard immediately.

But that never materialized. Our soldiers wanted to continue to serve their country, knowing they might be deployed once again.

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What’s really interesting is that more than 75 percent of guardsmen enlisted since the start of the global war on terrorism. That’s a strong indication of the patriotism of our young men and women in uniform.

They know why they’re joining the National Guard.

H Gen. Anderson: And our recruiting has enjoyed great success.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: Over the last decade, North Dakota leads the

nation in terms of recruiting individuals on a per-capita basis. The most important aspect of recruiting is helping people understand this as an opportunity to serve their country. North Dakotans respond at about four times the national average, which is a strong statement of patriotism. Let’s not forget that less than one-half of 1 percent of our nation is fighting to protect our freedoms.

H Gen. Anderson: A crucially important component of the National Guard is our deep connection to the community.

We have facilities in communities throughout the nation.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: Lt. Gen. Blum,

Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk passes a sandbag to a civilian, flood-fighting volunteer in 2010 along the Red River near Fargo, ND.

who was Chief of the National Guard Bureau (2003-08), commented that when you activate the Guard, you activate the country. There are well over 3,000 armories and other facilities nationwide where soldiers and airmen gather for weekend and annual training.

These citizen-soldiers are the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins and friends of the community. The National Guard enjoys that strong connection.

Since 9/11, the North Dakota National Guard has lost 14 soldiers in the war on terror. As senior leaders, you become very close to the families of the fallen. Every family is concerned that their loved ones, who gave their lives for this country, will be forgotten. I tell them we will remember the sacrifice their loved ones and their families made. On September 11, 2009, we dedicated a memorial at Fraine Barracks in Bismarck, honoring North Dakota service members killed during global war on terrorism. There is a sign at the bottom of the Battle Cross that says, “We will never forget.”

H Gen. Anderson: Another unique aspect of the Guard, which became

particularly evident during your tenure, is its dual role. We also perform

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state missions during domestic emergencies, most memorably during the floods in 1997, 2009 and 2011.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: When the Guard isn’t part of the warfight under the president’s command, we serve the state governor. Nationwide, governors realize the value of the Guard in providing protection for lives and property, and supporting state residents in time of need. In recent decades, the North Dakota National Guard has been called out dozens of times during floods and fires, and after tornadoes, ice storms, snowstorms and other emergencies. A good example occurred at the University of Mary last April when fires burned out of control south of Bismarck. As the winds shifted and started to blow towards the university, our Black Hawk helicopters were in the air, within an hour or two, dropping water to suppress the fire.

H Gen. Anderson: Also unique to the Guard is the cooperation between states. When we had the floods here in 2009 and 2011, you were able to call on other states and ask for their assistance.

Neighboring states sent equipment, materiel, and soldiers and airmen to support our efforts.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: It’s called the Emergency Management Compact.

The Guard is always ready nationwide as a critical asset for domestic operations and homeland security.

What many people don’t realize is that the National Guard is the oldest branch of our military. The first militia was called together in Massachusetts in 1636 and that became the roots of the National Guard. Our country established an active Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines with the National Guard as the backbone of our nation’s defense because of our ability to be part of the warfight if necessary and to serve domestically.

Maj. Gen. Sprynczynatyk gives a high-five to the child of a deploying Air National Guard member at the send-off ceremony in Fargo, ND.

H Gen. Anderson: The current federal budget challenges have generated controversy over the future balance of active forces versus the Guard. Do you have any insight about what’s going on?

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: From a fiscal standpoint, our military needs to be made up of both active and reserve components. The National Guard costs 25

only a sixth of what it costs to maintain active component forces. We train to the same standards as active personnel, but for much less expense.

When we’re called upon to go to war, we complete the training in a matter of weeks and then we’re able to be engaged as much as those serving on active duty. Also important is that guardsmen are citizen-soldiers. They have civilian job experience and skill sets to add to their military experience and skill sets.

H Gen. Anderson: Yes, the National Guard is

such a significant player in national defense because of the ability to leverage civilian skills. When we were deployed to Iraq, our engineering unit had the advantage of having soldiers who had performed the same tasks in their civilian careers. They were contractors, engineers, electricians and plumbers with tremendous CVs. They performed better than anyone else. The same concept applies to the National Guard’s new cyberdefense mission in partnership with the active component. Our soldiers already have IT, cybersecurity and national security experience.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: Also in North Dakota, we have been remotely piloting drones around the world. The significance of this is that we aren’t putting soldiers and airmen in harm’s way. We execute reconnaissance and combat support missions literally from thousands of miles away. That’s a first step in using technology and robotics to fight without risking casualties.

H Gen. Anderson: As well, the technology

The Memorial to the Fallen is located at Fraine Barracks, the headquarters of the North Dakota National Guard in Bismarck, ND. 26

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is scalable. In land operations, the Army uses remotely controlled robots for antiImprovised Explosive Device detection, which is a tremendous asset for our soldiers. There is great potential for additional remote-controlled and autonomous weapons systems to be integrated into our units to protect warfighters. This changes the nature of warfighting and recruiting. Increasingly technology will protect soldiers, and this will require that future warfighters become more and more technically proficient.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: There’s no question about it. In the future, technological intelligence will be even more critical, and we will look for young men and women with those aptitudes and skills.

H Gen. Anderson: What many people don’t realize is that the National Guard plays a significant role in the Department of Defense’s ability to build strategic partnerships worldwide. It’s truly an exchange of information, training and culture.

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: Over the last 25 years, the National Guard has become a part of the State Partnership Program. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, our country was struggling with how to build relationships with former Soviet republics. In response, partnerships developed between state National Guards and various countries. As soldiers, it’s very easy for officers and sergeants of one country to talk to those in another nation because we understand our purpose, our focus and our mission. Since the early 1990s, the program has grown to 70 partnerships with 76 countries worldwide.

About 12 years ago, we initiated a partnership with Ghana in West Africa, which has given our soldiers and airmen an opportunity to build a diplomatic relationship with Ghanaian peers. We travel to each other’s countries to share resources, training and ideas on leadership, as we learn about the other culture. These exchanges transcend military-to-military exchanges to include civilian agencies and businesses. The success of the Ghanaian partnership led to establishing partnerships with two neighboring countries, Togo and Benin, two years ago. I’m proud that North Dakota is the only state with partnerships with three countries.

H Gen. Anderson: Often I’ve heard from commanders in other branches

of the U.S. military that the reputation of the North Dakota National Guard has been outstanding wherever they have served in the world.

[Military] history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security.

Victor Davis Hanson

‘Not how many, but where,’ is all Spartans ever wanted to know of the enemy.

Plutarch

HH Gen. Sprynczynatyk: I traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan several

times and when I talked to commanding officers, they had nothing but praise for the professionalism, knowledge, experience and skills of our soldiers and airmen. We wear shoulder patches—the straight arrow for the Army Guard or the Happy Hooligan patch of the Air Guard—signifying that we’re part of the North Dakota National Guard. These patches are wellknown throughout the military, and I have been complimented often for the excellence of our guardsmen. ±

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Commentary

Closer to the Robo-Rubicon Robots, Autonomy and the Future (or Maybe Not) of You USAF Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Robert H. Latiff, PhD, Adjunct Professor, University of Notre Dame Patrick J. McCloskey, Author & Director of Research & Publications, University of Mary

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hree years ago, Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff and I wrote an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal, titled “With Drone Warfare, America Approaches the Robo-Rubicon.” The Week, which reviews newspaper and magazine stories in the U.K. and U.S., highlighted the article in its “Best Columns-US” section.

“If you think drone warfare has created some tricky moral dilemmas, said [Latiff and McCloskey],” The Week began its précis, “just wait until we start sending robotic soldiers into battle.”

“Crossing the Rubicon,” of course, refers to Julius Caesar’s irrevocable decision that led to the dissolution of the Roman Republic, a limited democracy, and ushered in the Roman Empire, which would be run by one or more dictators (aka, emperors). On January 10, 49 BC, General Caesar led a legion of soldiers across the Rubicon River, breaking Roman law and making civil war inevitable. The expression has survived as an idiom for passing the point of no return.

Our contention in the article was that full lethal autonomy—that is, empowering robotic weapons systems with the decision to kill humans on the battlefield—crosses a critical moral Rubicon. If machines are given the legal power to make kill decisions, then it inescapably follows that humanity has been fundamentally devalued. Machines can be programmed to follow rules, but they are not persons capable of moral decisions. Surely taking human life is the most profound moral act, which, if relegated to robots, becomes trivial, along with all other moral questions.

If machines are given the legal power to make kill decisions [lethal autonomy], then it inescapably follows that humanity has been fundamentally devalued.

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Not only does this change the nature of war, but human nature and democracy are put at risk. This is not merely a theoretical issue but a fast-approaching reality in military deployment.

What is full lethal autonomy?

Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles that—along with unmanned ground, underwater and eventually space vehicles— are crude predecessors of emerging robotic armies. In the coming decades, far more technologically sophisticated robots will be integrated into American fighting forces.

As well, because of budget cuts, increasing personnel costs, high-tech advances, and international competition for air and technological superiority, the military is already pushing toward deploying large numbers of advanced robotic weapons systems.

There are obvious benefits, such as greatly increased battle reach and efficiency, and most importantly the elimination of most risk to our human soldiers.

Unmanned weapons systems are already becoming increasingly autonomous. For example, the Navy’s X-47B, a prototype drone stealth strike fighter, can now navigate highly difficult aircraft-carrier takeoffs and landings. At the same time, technology continues to push the kill decision further from human agency. Drones are operated by soldiers thousands of miles away. And any such system can be programmed to fire “based solely on its own sensors,” as stated in a 2011 U.K. defense report. In fact, the U.S. military has been developing lethally autonomous drones, as the Washington Post reported in 2011.

Atlas (right) is a “high mobility, humanoid robot,” according to its developer, Boston Dynamics. Several were provided to the DARPA Robotics Challenge program in 2013. An updated version was unveiled in February, demonstrating increased agility and autonomy. “Our long-term goal is to make robots that have mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence comparable to humans and animals, or perhaps exceeding them,” said company founder Marc Raibert, “[T]his robot is a step along the way.” This robot (and many other types) could also be weaponized and given lethal autonomy.

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Veneer of Human Control Lethal autonomy hasn’t happened—yet. The kill decision is still subject to many layers of officer command, and the U.S. military maintains that “appropriate levels of human judgment” will remain in place. However, although there has not been a change in official policy, it is fast becoming a fantasy to maintain that humans can make a meaningful contribution to kill decisions in the deployment of drones (or other automated weapons systems) and in robot-human teams.

Throughout our military engagements in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. enjoyed complete air superiority. This enabled complex oversight of drone attacks in which there was the luxury of sufficient time for layers of legal and military authority to confer before the decision to fire on a target was made. This would not exist in possible military engagements with Russia, China or even Iran. The choice would be lethally autonomous drones or human pilots—and significant casualties.

Aside from pilot risk, consider the cost differential. Each new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet will cost about $100 million and an additional $6 million per year to train an Air Force pilot. In contrast, each hunter-killer drone (MQ-9 Reaper) costs about $14 million.

Military verbiage has shifted from humans remaining “in the loop” regarding kill decisions, to “on the loop.” Soon technology will push soldiers “out of the loop,” since the human mind cannot function fast enough to process the data that computers digest instantaneously. Future warfare won’t be restricted to single drones but masses of robotic weapons systems communicating at the speed of light.

Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funds U.S. military research, began exploring how to design an aircraft carrier in the sky, from which waves of fighter drones would be deployed.

These drone swarms will be networked and communicate with each other instantaneously. How will human operators coordinate kill decisions for several, if not dozens, of drones simultaneously?

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”in “Runaround,” 1942

Third Offset Strategy U.S. defense secretary Ashton Carter terms the Pentagon’s new approach to deterrence as the “third offset strategy.” The first offset in the post-WWII era, which asserted American technological superiority, was the huge investment in nuclear weapons in the 1950s to counter Soviet conventional forces.

Twenty years later, after the Russians caught up in the nuke race, the U.S. reestablished dominance via stealth bombers, GPS, precision-guided missiles and other innovations. Now that the Russians and Chinese have developed sophisticated missiles and air defense systems, the U.S. is seeking advantage 31

through robotic weapons systems and autonomous support systems, such as drone tankers for mid-air refueling.

What’s remarkable is how publicly the defense department is talking about robotic autonomy, including human-robot teams and human-machine enhancements, such as exoskeletons and sensors embedded in human warfighters to gather and relay battlefield information. Easily accessible online are the “The Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036” and “USAF Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047,” which articulate the integration of unmanned systems in every aspect of the U.S. military’s future.

Given the pace at which AI is developing, this integration will accelerate.

How then are fewer soldiers supposed to maintain human veto power over faster and massively greater numbers of robotic weapons on land, underwater and in the skies?

Death by Algorithm The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

As we wrote, “When robots rule warfare, utterly without empathy or compassion, humans retain less intrinsic worth than a toaster—which at least can be used for spare parts.” The rejoinder is that robots would do better than humans on the battlefield.

For example, Ronald Arkin, PhD, the director of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s mobile robot lab, is programing robots to comply with international humanitarian law. Perhaps someday, as a result, an autonomous weapon might be able to distinguish between a small combatant and a child, resolving one crucial challenge. Let’s hope the enemy doesn’t wear masks— or put them on children—to confuse the robot’s facial recognition software.

Other computer scientists are focusing on machine learning as the route to making robots, in their view, better ethical decision-makers than humans.

At one lab, researchers read bedtime stories to robots to teach them right from wrong. Apparently Dr. Seuss was R2-D2’s favorite author.

These endeavors, however, are beside the point since a robot’s actions are not moral, even if it passes the Turing test and behaves so intelligently it seems indistinguishable (except for appearance, for now) from humans.

Robotic actions are a matter of programming, not moral agency. They will hunt solely by sensor and software calculation.

In the end, “death by algorithm is the ultimate indignity.”

National Discussion & DARPA Report Over 35 years ago, a scholar noted the basic problem regarding new technologies in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Before development, not enough is known about risk factors to regulate the technology sensibly. Yet after deployment, it’s too late since the market penetration is too great to reverse usage.

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In this case, however, there is enough legitimate concern about lethally autonomous weapons systems to warrant serious consideration, and deployment has not yet occurred. A significant step towards consideration was taken in 2014 with the publication of a report by the National Research Council and National Academy of Engineering, at the request of DARPA, “Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security.” The report studied the ethical, legal and societal issues relating to the research, development and use of technologies with potential military applications. Maj. Gen. Latiff served on the committee that focused on militarily significant technologies, including robotics and autonomous systems.

The report cited fully autonomous weapons systems that have already been deployed without controversy. Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system automatically shoots down barrages of rockets fired by Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization. The Phalanx Close-In Weapons System protects U.S. ships and land bases by automatically downing incoming rockets and mortars. These weapons would respond autonomously to inbound manned fighter jets and make the kill decision without human intervention. However, these systems are defensive and must be autonomous since humans can’t react fast enough.

Such weapons don’t pose the same moral dilemma as offensive weapons since we have a fundamental right to self-defense.

Alicia Vikander plays Ava, a humanoid robot with heightened artificial intelligence in the British sci-fi film “Ex Machina,” released in 2015. The film hinges on Ava’s ability to pass a sophisticated version of the Turing test by convincing Caleb (left), a computer programmer, that he can relate to her as if “she” is human. As Ava’s creator, Nathan (right), hopes, “she” demonstrates true intelligence. But as Nathan warns Caleb, Ava’s feelings and seductive qualities are manipulations.

Ava is a machine, no matter how ingenious, that precipitates a calculatingly cold outcome.

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[W]e are … at the leading edge of an explosive wave of innovation that will ultimately produce robots geared toward nearly every conceivable commercial, industrial and consumer task.

Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Also mentioned were offensive weapons that could easily operate with complete lethal autonomy, such as the Mark 48 torpedo and iRobot, which is equipped with a grenade launcher. The report sets out the framework for initiating a national discussion, such as whether such autonomous systems could comply with international law.

However, if machines are deployed to seek out and kill people, there is no basis for humanitarian law in the first place. Every individual’s intrinsic worth, which constitutes the basis of Western civilization, drowns in the Robo-Rubicon.

How much intrinsic worth does a machine have? None. Its value is entirely instrumental. We don’t hold memorial services for the broken lawnmower.

At best we recycle. There is no Geneva Convention for the proper treatment of can openers or even iPhones. Once lethal autonomy is deployed, then people can have no more than instrumental value, which means that democracy and human rights are mere tools to be used or discarded as the ruling classes see fit.

The answer to the dilemma lethal autonomy poses, to be clear, does not involve a retreat from technology but the securing of sufficient advantage that the U.S. can leverage international conventions on the military uses and proliferation of lethal autonomy and other worrisome emerging technologies.

Big Autonomy Whereas the shortterm impact of AI (artificial intelligence) depends on who controls it, the longterm impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

Stephen Hawking

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The wider importance of lethal autonomy becomes clear in considering the enormous social threat that automation poses. On the horizon is massive job displacement via automated taxis, trucks and increasingly sophisticated task automation affecting most employment arenas. Already in Japan there is a fully autonomous hotel without a single human worker. In many states, truck driver is the most common job. What will hundreds of thousands of ex-drivers, averaging over 50 years of age, do once autonomous transportation corridors are created? True, there’s a shortage of neurosurgeons—at least for now.

IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence (AI) system that famously beat the world’s top Go master last March, then released a financial robo-adviser for institutional clients. Not only are human financial advisers getting nervous, so are professionals throughout finance due to the proliferation of roboadvice. And the scenario is similar to lethal autonomy in that these tools are marketed as assistive—i.e., with human professionals in the loop gaining productivity. But how long will that last as AI evolves and faster computer chips are developed? IBM now offers free access to anyone to a Cloud version of quantum computing for open-source experimentation.

As AI becomes increasingly advanced, more functions will be done better,

faster and cheaper by machines. Already, autonomous robots are performing surgery on pigs. Researchers claim that robots would outperform human surgeons on human patients, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.

Some experts argue that the “jobless future” is a myth, that “when machines replace one kind of human capability, as they did in the transitions from … freehold farmer, from factory worker, from clerical worker, from knowledge worker,” wrote Steve Denning in his column at Forbes.com, “new human experiences and capabilities emerged.”

No doubt this will be true to some extent as technology facilitates fascinatingly interesting and valuable new occupations, heretofore unimaginable. But the problem isn’t that machines are replacing “one kind of human capability,” but that robots threaten to replace almost all of them within a short period of time.

There are two questions: What will happen to our humanity in big automation’s tsunami, and who (or what) does this technology serve?

Regarding our humanity, recent trends are disturbing. In medicine, not only are jobs at risk in the long run, but robots will Every individual’s intrinsic worth, increasingly make ethical and medical decisions. Consider which constitutes the basis of the APACHE medical system, which helps determine the best treatment in ICU units. What happens when the doctor, Western civilization, drowns in who is supposed to be in charge, decides to veto the robothe Robo-Rubicon. advice? If the patient dies, will there not be multi-million dollar lawsuits—and within seconds once the law profession is roboticized (thereby replacing rule of law with regulation by algorithm)? In short, in this arena and elsewhere, are we outsourcing our moral and decision-making capacity?

“No one can serve two masters,” said Jesus in an era when children were educated at home, learning carpentry (to choose a trade at random) from their father. Today, increasing numbers of children—now a third, according to a survey in the U.K.—start school without basic social skills, such as the ability to converse, because they suffer from a severe lack of attention and interaction with parents who are possessed by smartphones. Technology has become the god of worship, and kids are learning they are far less important than digital devices. How much will this generation value—or even know— their humanity and that of others? Is it not “natural” in this inverted world to completely cede character and choice to the Matrix?

“Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal,” wrote C.S. Lewis.

“As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

Machines can support both spheres—if intelligently designed according to just principles with people maintaining control. This would seem common sense, but that is becoming the rarest element on the periodic table.

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“The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834,” J.M.W. Turner, oil on canvas.

Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

Stephen Hawking

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Tally-Ho & Tally Sticks

Millennials and succeeding generations will remake the world via digital technology. Big data and big automation might cure cancer, reverse aging, increase human intelligence and solve environmental issues. Imagine a war where few die or lose limbs. These wonders and more seem more than plausible in what many see as a dawning utopia. And it’s not likely to be an “either/or.” A kidnapped child will be located in minutes and the same surveillance tools might greatly restrict personal freedoms.

Certainly there will be huge economic and creative opportunities— for some. Experts predict that robot applications will render trillions of dollars in labor-saving productivity gains by 2025. Meanwhile, an Oxford University study in 2013 predicted that about half of jobs in the U.S. are vulnerable to being automated in the near future. If, as seems likely, jobs destroyed greatly outnumber jobs created, what does society do with the replaced?

Some can retrain or transfer skills, but most might become permanently jobless. It’s unlikely that many former taxicab drivers or even surplus

middle-aged lawyers, as examples, could be repurposed for most digitalbased jobs—as those positions decline in number, too.

Consider the fate of tally sticks, which are notched pieces of wood used from prehistoric times to keep accounts (ergo, “tallies”). In 1826, England’s Court of Exchequer began transferring records from these sticks to ink and paper. By 1834, there were tens of thousands of unused tally sticks, which were disposed of in a stove in the House of Lords. There were so many of these suddenly useless carbon-based units that the fire spread to the wood paneling and ultimately burned down both the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

If the current presidential election cycle has shown anything, it’s that there is already growing dissatisfaction among the majority of Americans, which could spark a social conflagration.

Nonsense, some might argue, Americans take care of their own. Perhaps, but our fundamental commitment to the common good might disintegrate.

The U.S. Constitution was founded on the Judeo-Christian belief in the intrinsic worth of every individual, as articulated eloquently in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” True, it took a century to outlaw slavery and another hundred years to eliminate the legal barriers to racial equality. But justice prevailed precisely because injustice contradicts the nation’s founding principles.

There was an inevitable logic to the civil rights movement.

The question now is whether full lethal autonomy destroys that foundation. If technology matters more than people, then rights are completely “alienable.” If software renders human life expendable, then it is a much smaller moral leap to indifference towards those replaced by automation. Without a career and the ability to earn a living and accumulate enough resources to start a business, there is neither liberty nor any pursuit of happiness. Ironically, a proposal that is gaining support in Silicon Valley—where automation is being spearheaded—is a basic guaranteed income. This might relieve some guilt, but it is neither affordable nor desirable. To work is essential to developing human potential. In fact, 78 percent of Swiss voters rejected a guaranteed-income proposal on a national referendum on June 5.

We wrote the original article in The Wall Street Journal with urgency to provoke discussion of lethal autonomy (tally-ho! for robots) as a moral pitfall and gateway, otherwise it will soon become a fait accompli.

The evening after crossing the Rubicon, Caesar dined with his officers and uttered the famous phrase, “The die is cast.” Ominous words for our future—if we fail to assert our humanity. ±

We are now entering the epic struggle for control: the exercise of “cyberpower” across the world of man, machine and network.

Mark Hagerott, PhD, Chancellor of the North Dakota University System

Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff and Patrick McCloskey serve on the advisory board of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values at the University of Notre Dame.

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Art

The Waxing & Waning of Light Mike Paul: Midwest Artist with Ancient Technique Jerry Anderson, Art Director, University of Mary Patrick J. McCloskey, Author, Director of Research & Publications, University of Mary

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ike Paul paints mostly landscapes set in the northern states from the Great Lakes to the foothills of the Rockies. The works are as breathtakingly beautiful as they are subdued. Rather than jumping out at the viewer in bright colors and reflected light, Paul’s paintings invite the viewer in—deeper and deeper. Color and light seem suspended in his scenes, with forms giving shape to sky, lake, tree, prairie—and to the radiant essence that sustains creation. Big skies flow overhead as oceans with clouds swelling and breaking like waves. Nature seems to inhale and exhale at the pace of constellations overhead, with barns, farmhouses, telephone poles and other human fabrications bobbing gently as time and terrain merge.

Yet there is a deep rootedness: human beings in the land as farmers, artists and viewers, even though people seldom appear. Barns and houses sprout from the ground and flower along with the surrounding flora and waving prairie grasses. A light gentle at times, pensive in other works, falls across compositions without sentimentality. The muted, indirect quality of light in the paintings allows the solidity, for example of the severe rock island in “Boxcar, Pigeon Bay” (page 44), to reveal an inner luminescence. The fractured yellow and beige stone monolith glows subtly like the shell of a primordial beeswax candle burning down deeply into its core.

Paul paints in encaustic, an ancient technique dating back 2,000 years, which involves applying color pigments mixed with melted beeswax to canvas or linen. Applying and then fusing multiple layers of color and wax is a laborious process, but it produces translucent, richly textured paintings. Paul prefers painting on linen rather than canvas, which he says, “is much more

Above, “It Was a Dakota Kind of Winter,” 2015, encaustic on linen.

The farm is located in Paul’s “favorite area in North Dakota, just east of Hettinger.”

Opposite, “Spider Island,” 2016, encaustic on linen. The island is located in Spider Lake, Wisconsin.

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[T]aciturn dignity, a mater-of-fact stillness argues for finding poetry in the plain ... a principled ethos of painting well without showing off.

Gregory J. Scott, art critic, Minneapolis Star Tribune

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expensive but provides better quality.”

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in encaustic because the main technical problem—how to melt and fuse wax efficiently—has been solved by using a heat gun, which is a robust version of the everyday hair dryer.

Encaustic paintings are very durable, unless exposed to extreme heat or cold. They are impervious to moisture (perhaps not floods), and the colors encased within wax layers will not yellow or otherwise change over time. The paintings retain luminosity indefinitely. In fact, ancient Egyptian mummy portraits have survived two millennia without cracking, flaking or fading.

Mike Paul was born in Helena, Montana, in 1956 and grew up around the country in an Air Force family. In 1979, he completed a BA in Art History

and Mathematics at Concordia College. Then he served in the Air Force as a geodesist (who determine exact navigation coordinates) until 1988. Paul studied drawing and painting at Minnesota State University Moorhead and earned a BFA in 1995. The same year he founded Flathead Studios (after his military hairstyle) and began working full time as an artist—with various side jobs, such as furniture maker and math tutor at Mathnasium.

Paul lived in Bismarck from 2008 to 2014. Then he moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with his wife, Karen, who works as an industrial and corporate psychology consultant. They have two children, a daughter who is currently training to become an Air Force pilot and a son who is applying to join the United States Marine Band.

“God Must be a Cowboy,” 2006, encaustic on canvas.

Paul’s mother grew up on this farm in western Montana.

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Above, “Guardian of the Little Missouri,” 2014, encaustic on linen. This tree stands where the Little Missouri River flows from South Dakota into North Dakota.

Right, “Just Then a Crow Called Out,” 2014, encaustic on linen. These barns stand without a house near Bismarck. As Paul approached to take a photo on a bitterly cold day, a crow called out, startling him.

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P

aul adds turpentine and stand oil to the beeswax as he melts the compound to the consistency of paste. Then he adds color pigments, often in powder form since the particles suspend better in wax. Although the wax-paint mixture can be applied with a brush, Paul prefers a painting knife, which has a pointed tip and is “cranked”

like a trowel. Painting knives are better suited than brushes to creating texture, areas of flat color, precise edges, and to fashioning tiny shapes and color details. With this deceptively simple tool and a sheet of plate glass as a palette, Paul transforms flat, blank surfaces into Northern Plains scenes, “which have a mystic hold on my imagination.”

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Left, “Blue Violet Waltz, 2009, encaustic on linen. The house is located in eastern North Dakota.

Below, “Boxcar, Pigeon Bay,” 2014, encaustic on linen.

Opposite Top, “A Song Flew Up to Heaven,” 2009, encaustic on linen. Lake Kabetogama in nothern Minnesota.

Opposite Bottom, “Fagerland,” 2014, encaustic on linen.

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I paint in encaustic to get the luminosity and texture I can’t get with oil. It allows me to break up the painting’s surface.

So you’re looking through the wax into different layers of suspended color and reflected light.

– Mike Paul

“T

he ‘Fagerland’ painting is my maternal great-grandfather’s homestead near Pierpont in northeastern South Dakota,” said Mike Paul. “At fourteen years of age, Elias Fagerland emigrated by himself from Fagerland Island, Norway, to New York City in 1884. He worked there for two years and then traveled by wagon train to the Dakotas. In 1892, Fagerland filed for a 120-acre homestead, which cost $13.00. On January 21, 1899, he made the final $3.00 payment and, on the same day, became an American citizen. I believe he built the barns, which still stand, but not the house. My grandfather Ernest Fagerland was born there in 1898. Six years later, the family moved to western Montana to establish another farm, which is portrayed in ‘God Must be a Cowboy’ (pages 32-33). That’s where my mother was born.”

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“Hutu,” 1999, graphite on Rives heavyweight paper.

“I

met this Hutu woman in 1996 when I was volunteering with Lutheran Social Services in Fargo,” Paul recalled. “Her entire family, including grandchildren, had been massacred in Rwanda, yet somehow she had hope, at least in the afterlife, and kept her sense of humor.”

Paul’s works are included in the public collections of the North Dakota Museum

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of Art, the Plains Art Museum, the University of Minnesota, Steensland Art Museum, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Mayo Clinic, Lutheran Brotherhood, Pillsbury and Cosmopolitan Magazine. In 2012, he was awarded a grant from the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Paul is represented by Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“W

hy are you planting a new orchard?” Mike Paul asked two farmers who were digging holes and placing seedlings in a field on their farm, which was 30 miles north of Fargo near the Red River. The farmers were brothers in their mid-80s who already had a large orchard, which they had tended for decades.

“It’s not for us,” they replied. “The orchard is for our grandchildren.”

‘Remarkable,’ Paul thought. The brothers Tjornehoj had emigrated from Finland as teenagers.

They never married nor sired children. Their “heirs” would be whoever farmed here after they passed.

Paul lived in Fargo from 1986 to 2000 and made many excursions north to farming areas in the Red River Valley to sketch and photograph landscapes and barns for his paintings. He met the Tjornehoj brothers in the early 1990s and returned to visit their farm on several occasions.

“It was a beautiful farm with neat, simple buildings,” Paul recalled. “And there were fascinating old objects in the barns and elsewhere on the property.”

The brothers said little when Paul examined or talked about an item. Around 1997, they asked if he would like to take any objects home.

“Very much,” Paul replied and the brothers Tjornehoj led him into their main barn where “in a pile was all the stuff I had looked at during my visits.”

Paul took the things back to his studio and began fashioning statues from the pieces of wood, wire and metal, and objects such as old pulleys, iron hinges and oxen yokes. He christened the works “Barn People” and created 14 sculptures, nine of which have sold and five are still available.

“I love to use found, leftover and unique materials to make something interesting,” Paul said in his softly resonating voice. ±

Gift of the Barn People

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Culture

Tribe, Time & Trait German Russians on the Prairie Before and After World War II Karen Herzog, Editor-in-Chief, Momentum Magazine, University of Mary

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he stories of the tribe of those calling themselves the Germans from Russia are narratives of grit and faith, tragedy and endurance.

Humble little bands from southern Germany had lumbered halfway across Europe to the Russian steppes at the offer of free land and autonomy by Czarina Catherine the Great. There they plowed and planted and built prosperous, German-tidy villages.

After a century or so, things changed. Russian political unrest began to frown upon their isolated contentment.

The Czarina was gone and her promises with her.

And so, the big families of the German-Russians started arriving in the Dakotas around the 1880s as a confusion of children and baggage on raw railroad platforms in jumping-off places like Eureka, South Dakota. Der Vater would anxiously scan the waiting crowd for a man from their old village in Russia, the first to risk his well-tended vineyards and fields for this featureless ocean of grass.

Like coal-mine canaries, these harbingers had sensed the first drift of toxins in the air of their Black Sea villages, foresaw the ending of their way of life. They smelled trouble brewing in Russia and saw in America another offer of free land. Land was the prize. Land was what endured.

Land was everything.

More and more, families took the risk and leapt across the Atlantic’s landless expanse.

I am the fourth generation of one of those families. My paternal grandparents, Christian and Katharina (Gebhardt) Rempfer, proved up their 160-acre homestead in southeastern North Dakota in 1900. This story is mine, and theirs, and belongs to many others as well.

‘Give us this day our daily bread’ was more than a petition in the Sunday liturgy, but a practical working pattern for farm life, part of an understood covenant—God provided the raw materials, humans provided the sweat and muscle.

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January, 1950s/1960s, Dickey County, North Dakota

By the time Dad came in from two hours of trundling the flat hay wagon through the frozen pasture, cutting the double strings of 40-pound bales with his pocket knife and off-loading them into a slow swarm of white-faced Herefords, he was temporarily snow-blind. His insulated coveralls and fur-lined hat were white with snow. His hands, when he stripped off his heavy leather gloves, were also white, the blood having long since fled his extremities.

On those scalding cold days, when Mom dressed her warmest to gather eggs and feed chickens, she would take down a relic of the old folks’ life in Russia. Folding the massive square of wool into a triangle, she would carefully tie it under her chin. As she crossed the farmyard, the fringed wool shawl— the babushka—bobbed gloriously red against layer upon layer of whiteness.

Intimately molded to the subtleties of the natural world—the smell of rain on spring-warmed soil, the proper plumpness of wheat heads undulating under a prairie wind—the tribe learned in this new place to offer directions in terms of gravel road, slough, railroad tracks, country school, grain elevator, church steeple.

March

The flatness and vastness of the landscape could only be captured in photos, like this one, taken from the top of the windmill. Opposite, the replacement of horse teams by tractor power changed a way of life forever.

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The bathroom floor in our circa-1900 farmhouse sagged slightly to the north because it was an add-on.

The original outhouse was still standing, past the lilacs and tucked under the scrub ash and elm planted by my father during the drought years of the 1930s.

Occasionally, on a sleety, chill March afternoon, I would get off the school bus and go into the bathroom to find a Hereford calf in the bathtub.

Wet calves chill fast on cold muck, and sometimes a mother would butt one away when he tried to nurse. These, Dad would bring in for a day or so, to prevent pneumonia and hoping that the mother would have a change of heart.

America saved this tribe from extinction in Russia, only to work another kind of dissolution in its proverbial melting pot. But this kind of speculation about the dim future was a luxury compared to the daily worries that go with dependence on the land. Above and over all, there was work to be done.

Always work.

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April

Self-sufficiency was a high priority—having one’s own gas pump, a large garden in the summer, full root cellar in the winter, hogs, fowl, beef and dairy cattle, and goose-down feathers for a traditional wedding gift of pillows. Opposite, the first automobiles meant that large broods of young people could take Sunday expeditions to places such as Whitestone Hill.

The first true day of spring isn’t necessary the equinox or even Easter.

Here’s how I recognized it: Waiting at the mailbox for the school bus to appear lumbering down our gravel road, the sun would shine with a new yellow-greenness. In the ditches, the surface of the puddles became delicate laces of ice overlaid with meltwater.

And there would be a meadowlark singing, effervescent, his song carrying for miles in the clear, cold air.

In the summer kitchen, baby chickens would be surrounded by a protective wall of corrugated cardboard, all soft yellow down, cheeping, warmed under the heat lamp.

That was the first day of spring. Even a blizzard after that would be a spring one.

For two or three generations after immigration, church, clan, language kept the tribe bonded despite the strictures of the Homestead Act, which required them to disperse from the old communal village to individual 160-acre farms.

That separation from village life was the first great unhooking of the tribe, though it wasn’t apparent at first. There was too much work to do. The great prairie sod was sliced and overturned. Wheat was planted. Barley and oats and flax went into the rich, thick clay. Cattle grazed behind barbed wire fences and piglets grew up to become homemade pork sausage.

The prairie was raw, but the work was familiar. The seasons of the plow, the disc, the rake, the harrow, the horse-drawn, and then steam-powered thresher.

The cyclical rhythms of the farm held.

June

The gritty bar of Lava soap on the sink left a gray puddle where Dad had scrubbed at the ground-in grease on his hands that was gradually silting in the river of his lifeline and the whorls of his fingertips.

Navy blue bruises under his fingernails and gouges and scrapes were always in various stages of healing from wrenching at stubborn, oil-coated bolts underneath some machine.

Sometimes when the wrench slipped, he would swear, but in German with “Gott im himmel!”, the closest he ever came to taking the Lord’s name in vain.

In the country, everything you don’t have on hand or can’t make or fix yourself wastes precious hours.

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With no nearby gas station to coast to when the tank reads ‘E’, it’s important to have your own gas pump by the garage with a sun-cracked black hose and a good credit record with the Standard Oil truck driver.

In a pinch, you can borrow from the farm down the road, but only sparingly and promptly repaid, lest you risk getting a reputation for being feckless.

On the prairie, church and country school kept transfusing life into traditional bonds that were stretching thin from the strains of fitting into a new land.

The Great Depression buckled that fragile stability. Farmers on the margins lost their homesteads, by drought or grasshoppers, to unpaid taxes.

When mouths were too many around the kitchen table and crops dried up, young men went off to the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal jobs program, or they were hired out to uncles or other farmers as field hands.

Then the tsunami that was World War II rolled out of Europe and the Pacific. When the war subsided, the old geography of pioneer life on the plains was changed forever.

The German language took a mortal blow as Uncle Sam homogenized ethnicities. The Dakota Germans’ Swabish dialect, with its mushy consonants, an antique relic of southern Germany, preserved in isolation on the

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot

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Russian steppe for 150 years, gave way to English at church, school and on Main Street.

After Pearl Harbor, when the Selective Service came looking, it found naïve, work-toughened farm boys conditioned to obedience. They were dispersed into the Army or enlisted in the Marines or the Air Force, though they’d never ridden on a plane, or the Navy, though they’d never seen an ocean.

Most survived but never returned to the farm. For one thing, tractors had put the horses out to pasture, and the labor of so many hands was no longer needed. That 160 acres of homestead couldn’t produce enough money to give all those sons the independence they wanted. They’d been to war, and they wouldn’t come back to be their father’s or their brother’s dependent or hired man.

And the G.I. Bill opened up another path: education, a different future, possibilities other than working sunup to sundown on the farm.

For those who remained, the air seemed to ring with a coming loneliness. The remaining connection was the summer visit to “the home place.”

July

In contrast to the German parents’ dread of their sons being conscripted into the Russian army, the new Americans were proud of their sons’ service for this country. Above, my grandmother’s brother, John Gebhardt, and his son, John L. Gebhardt.

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Ours was the home place. In the summer, our farm was gloriously overrun with waves of cousins, as my dad’s brothers and sisters returned to visit the relatives.

All day, we children ran wild and free, climbing on the old rusted thresher, a steampunk locust abandoned along a fencerow, crawling up the tall bale stacks, wandering through the pasture, keeping a safe distance from the bulls and snacking on shards of bright orange salt lick.

Quiet as a cathedral, with dust motes floating in the slanting sunbeams, the haymow in our weathered red barn held an immense hillock of loose hay in one corner and short stacks of bales along the sides.

Whatever else we played at all those long days, the best, the very best, was “The Rope.” It was glorious.

This beautiful rope hung in the cavernous haymow of our rambling red barn. An enormous barn spider, palpitating in its web, guarded the stairs, and to whom we gave a respectful, shuddering distance.

Thick as a snake, the rope curved over a monstrous pulley that slid on a rail along the entire length of the high-peaked ceiling. Doubling the rope into a sling, we’d sit or stand in the loop, climb a stack of bales and launch ourselves. Round and round the immensity, swinging in huge circles and arcs, we soared, letting go and dropping into the scratchy, fragrant pile of hay.

By suppertime, we’d be sweaty, grimy, crosshatched with scratches and straw in our hair, perfectly happy.

Everyone on a farm had work to do.

No one was allowed to slack. Small children were started out with easy chores—at the water pump and scoop shovel, set on the tractor seat with orders to just keep it going straight, locking the chicken coop against foxes, turning out the cows to graze, chaining the gates against their slow, bovine conviction that the most luscious grass is always just over the fence.

Everyone contributed. Grandmothers could still peel potatoes. Grandfathers could still drive the tractor and offer a great plenty of advice.

August In the dark confines of a milking shed at the end of a 90-plus degree day, with 20 large bovine bodies radiating heat, the ambient temperature approaches the surface of the sun.

Fly spray in a pump discouraged the huge black horseflies not at all.

As they tortured the steaming-hot cows, necks closed in their stanchions, the Guernseys would fight back with their only weapon, coarse tails that switched continuously. As I milked, compressed between two sweltering cows, I could anticipate either an occasional baseball-bat ‘thunk’ on the head from the tormented cow I was milking or—if Dad hadn’t trimmed the cow’s tail—a long dragging lock, which the cow could whip around my head to snap directly in my eye.

My grandmother, Katharina Rempfer, left, gave birth to 14 children and earned the highest compliment that could be given to a farm woman: “She could work like a man.”

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When I’d poured the last bucket of milk into the bowl of the cream separator, watching the yellow cream come out one spout and the blue skim out the other, it was my job to lug the skim in a crusted grease pail to the hogs, pouring it through the fence into the V-shaped trough, while the hogs stood in it with their front hooves to drink.

A bird’s-eye view of my Dakota tribe would reveal a fantastically intricate design of expected behaviors, mutual obligations, social strata, convoluted family trees and etiquettes formal as a minuet.

In the country, you help your neighbors, like them or not. If you shirk this obligation, the tribe knows it and labels you. The worst that can be said of anyone is that they are lazy or that they think they are better than others. To brag, to boast, is to lose face. The richest farmer in the neighborhood must be in appearance indistinguishable from the poorest. To provoke envy by displaying one’s good fortune is bad form.

Vestiges of this mutual obligation live on in the gravel road wave—two fingers lifted off the steering wheel as you pass one another, whether or not you recognize the car. The assumption is that anyone on this lonely stretch of road has some business being there.

To ignore someone in your vicinity—even through window glass—is unpardonably rude.

You are then regarded permanently by one and all as ‘too big for your britches.’

October Harvest creates hanging dust and red sunsets. Combines trundle along, row after row, round after round, stalks falling before their teeth and silky grain pouring out behind.

All summer, a garden harvest was also being tucked away. A dirt-floored basement with a prairie rock foundation, 50 degrees year-round, populated by salamanders and spiders, housed shelves of Ball jars filled with beans and beets, pickles and soup, tomatoes, and peaches and pears. Potatoes in gunnysacks and braids of onions hanging from nails were stored in the cold room.

Opposite, a crew building the farm’s new garage took shifts with the shingling.

Only working together made farm life possible.

Above, Aunt Pauline tended the clusters of cousins who returned to the home place every summer.

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Language was the great divide that separated those children of the tribe born before World War II and those bornafter. American G.I.s remembered their German but didn’t speak it at home. German stories and jokes that were uproarious to their elders at family gatherings meant nothing to little postwar American ears.

December

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.

It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

G.K. Chesterton

Photos courtesy of Michael Rempfer, from his family’s collection.

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December was a breather. Outdoor work was mostly maintenance and repairs and worry about next year. Now there would be time to pay a visit on a Sunday to the relatives, where the grandpas and great-uncles would smoke cigars, play cards and argue politics in a mix of German and English.

Those grandpas and great-uncles were bound at some point to fix us children underfoot with a gaze and ask, “Sprechts du Deutsch?”

Our honest answer, which used up most of the German we knew, was, “Nein or ein bisschen.”

Grandpas were disappointed but stoic. They didn’t blame us.

Their memories of beautifully tended Black Sea grapevines and orchards would die with them. Jokes and expressions, beloved hymns in German, were replaced by a single “Stille Nacht” sung by the children by candlelight at Christmas Eve services. That night, at least, all the centuries of the tribe’s life were gathered in one place—an ornately carved Gothic altar and pulpit from their deep Black Forest life of antiquity, housed in an iconic white steepled church on their new prairie home.

The grandparents, the ones who remembered Russia or whose parents did, are gone, and all that memory with them.

Nevertheless, they were proud to become Americans. And after all, with this tribe, sadness of one kind or another was familiar, an inevitable part of life. And their pragmatic nature understood that, after all, survival and their children’s survival, was worth the price.

And traits of the tribe remain: The first topic of any conversation is the weather. We notice each morning which direction the wind is coming from.

When it doesn’t rain, even though we have plenty of city water, we worry.

We worry about the land. How it’s doing. Is it too dry, too wet? When it blizzards, though we are snug in town, we worry about the cattle in the country. We plant vegetable gardens and are perplexed by those who don’t.

The ballast to this inherited worry is the bone-deep joy in the natural world, a love for big, open skies, the long view to the horizon, the blessing of a cottonwood’s shade on a scorching day. Gallant strings of migrating geese barking overhead pull us outside to wish them well.

We still belong to the land. That is the tribe’s legacy. ±

Where there is bread, there is home.

German-Russian proverb

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Economic Diversity

Winnebago & the Flying W(in) How to Build an Iconic Company and Save Rural America Kevin Mason, History Instructor, Waldorf University An earlier version of this article was presented at the Northern Great Plains History Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, on October 1, 2015.

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he Midwest has experienced significant declines in rural population beginning with the Great Depression and continuing in most areas today. Small towns have struggled to consistently maintain their populations, as the lack of job opportunities for young people precipitates relocation. John K. Hanson recognized this emerging trend in the 1950s and in response, founded Winnebago Industries in Forest City, Iowa, a town with 2,766 residents according to the 1950 census. Forest City is located in Hancock and Winnebago Counties, about 120 miles south of Minneapolis, Minnesota and the same distance north of Des Moines, Iowa.

In 1920, the U.S. was evenly split between its urban and rural residents. According to the 2010 census, 80.7 percent of Americans now live in urban centers, an increase of 61 percent. This demographic shift has been more dramatic throughout the Midwest. In Iowa, there was a 76-percent increase in urbanites, from 36.4 to 64 percent during the same period. North Dakota has seen a 340 percent increase in urban dwellers from 13.6 to 59.9 percent, again from 1920 to 2010.

Although Forest City enjoyed an 8.6-percent population increase from 1940 to 1950, the town’s small business owners were concerned about the long-term threat of declining population. Eight of the 17 rural towns within a 25-mile radius of Forest City lost residents between 1940 and 1950.

Several other towns were stagnant. Statewide, about 400,000 people moved

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Statewide, about 400,000 people moved from rural areas during the decade [1940-50].

from rural areas during the decade. In 1955 in response, local businessmen including Hanson banded together to form Forest City Development, Inc., in order to attract industry and provide job opportunities.

A year later, Hanson went on a family vacation by car, towing a prewar, fold-down trailer. The experience drew his attention to the value of hard-top trailers and opportunities in the motorized travel industry. In 1957, after visiting a travel-trailer manufacturing facility in Loveland, Colorado, Hanson explored the idea of building a factory in Forest City. After investigative research at the annual Indiana Mobile Home Manufacturers Association dealer show, Hanson convinced Forest City Industrial Development to pursue manufacturing travel trailers. With Hanson at the head of the committee tasked with making the project a reality, a limited stock offering attracted 208 small investors. Hanson soon struck a deal with Modernistic Industries, a California-based company, to open a branch plant to manufacture 15-foot, Aljo-brand travel trailers.

Production began in 1958 but was soon suspended when several local businessmen, who had initially invested in Modernistic, broke away to open a competing travel-trailer manufacturing company. The company became known as Forester Travel Trailers and survived until 1981, but never became a major player in the industry After negotiations with Modernistic Industries to resume production stalled, a business group including Hanson pooled resources to buy out Modernistic’s interest in the plant. Hanson oversaw the manufacture of 39 travel trailers that year. However, skepticism about the venture grew, since the company carried $42,000 in debt and had only $100 in the bank.

This provided Hanson with the opportunity to buy out his partners and, in 1960, he renamed the company Winnebago Industries.

“Winnebago” is the name that was given to the river flowing through Forest City to honor the Winnebago Indian tribe.

Winnebago Industries Hanson was born on a farm near Thor, Iowa, in 1913. The family soon moved 60 miles northeast to Forest City. Hanson attended Waldorf College in Forest City from 1930 to 1932, before completing a bachelor’s degree in mortuary science at the University of Minnesota in 1934. Hanson married Luise Voss a year later, and the couple raised two sons and a daughter. Hanson managed and then purchased his father’s furniture and appliance store in 1930 and then the family funeral home, located next door. In 1948, Hanson bought his father’s International Harvester implement dealership and adjacent Oldsmobile automobile dealership. Six years later, Hanson sold both dealerships to focus on the furniture and appliance store.

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Hanson displayed a knack for innovative business practices. TIME Magazine featured an article about the promotion he ran that allowed local farmers to exchange farm machinery or livestock for furniture or funeral services: “In Forest City, Iowa, furniture dealer John Hanson dramatized the U.S. farmer’s prosperity in a new way. He scrubbed the dollar signs off his price tags, substituted a figure in hog-pounds. When one of his customers came in with a load of fourteen 220-lb. hogs, Dealer Hanson did a little quick figuring. At 1941 prices, he pointed out, the hogs would have bought one 9-cu. ft. refrigerator. Last week the customer got not only the refrigerator, but an electric range, an automatic toaster—and $20 in change.”

According to Winnebago’s official history, Hanson’s “experience as a highly successful salesman and retail store operator” taught him the necessity of having “plus features on the product to give it a sales advantage, and that one had to make a margin on every sale to stay in business.” Hanson quickly retooled the Winnebago Tepee motor homes to set them apart from other travel trailers on the market. By March 1959, 53 improvements were worked into the design of the five models. For example, Hansen started using foam cushioning instead of springs, the norm in furniture even in mobile homes

John K. Hanson (third from right) poses with a shovel during the groundbreaking for the North Plant trailer facility on October 17, 1964 (Pictured L-R: Gerald Bowman, Paul Hanson, Larry Dunn, G.W. Peterson, John V. Hanson, John K. Hanson, Elliott Cooper, Luise V. Hanson). Photo: Winnebago Industries

He scrubbed the dollar signs off his price tags, substituted a figure in hogpounds.

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then. Not only did foam cushions prove more comfortable, they were lighter and more cost effective.

In addition to self-contained travel trailers, Winnebago diversified by offering sports toppers, which fit on the bed of a pickup truck and could sleep up to six people.

Next, Hanson focused on marketing tactics. He joined the board of the Mobile Home Manufacturers Association (MHMA) in 1960 to begin growing Winnebago from local producer to national icon. Although Winnebago Industries was MHMA’s smallest member company, Hanson used the annual conventions to debut new products and expand his customer base.

Innovation

To take full advantage of MHMA’s national forum (and then that of the Recreational Vehicles Industry Association, into which MHMA was absorbed in 1963), Hanson created new products and implemented a series of successful innovations. Winnebago’s iconic Flying W graphic and boxy shape with “eyebrow” styling debuted in the 1960s. Winnebago’s recreational vehicles (RVs) quickly became as popular as they were—and remain— instantly recognizable.

Critical to Winnebago’s success in becoming an industry giant was Hanson’s insistence of localizing and streamlining production processes.

Hanson’s business epiphany arrived with the founding of Stitchcraft as a Winnebago subsidy in 1960 in the basement of his downtown furniture store. Stitchcraft upholstered the convertible lounge beds, chairs, dinette seats, mattresses, curtains and drapes for all Winnebago models. This reduced production costs—and retail prices—significantly by eliminating outsourcing. By mid-1961, Stitchcraft’s staff had grown from three to 20 and soon to 70 workers at an almost equal number of commercial sewing machines. Hanson closed the furniture store to use the entire space for upholstering, and he had to rent space in other buildings nearby until Stitchcraft relocated to Winnebago Industries’ new 40,000-square foot campus on the south side of Forest City in 1965.

Expansion Key to the early sales growth was the establishment of “Dealer Days.” In 1960, about 150 Winnebago dealers from around the country traveled to Forest City to view the new 1961 products, a testament to the expanding base of product distribution that Hanson established in only two years.

After the initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on January 24, 1966, Winnebago’s stock appreciated 464 percent from $12.50 to $48.38 64

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John Hanson in 1960 working in the original Stitchcraft location in the basement of the Hanson furniture store in downtown Forest City.

Photo: Winnebago Industries

per share by the end of 1971, when sales revenue had grown to $70.9 million, which was a 58-percent gain on the previous year. Then revenue increased an astounding 88 percent the next year to $133 million—153 times the total sales ($869,000) in 1961.

Hanson worked with local companies to make the ownership process easier and less risky for both consumers and dealers. Hanson collaborated with local businesses to provide financing programs for dealers through the Winnebago Acceptance Corporation and for customers through Manufacturers Bank & Trust. Also, Hanson worked with Farm & City Insurance Services to provide replacement-cost insurance for consumers to mitigate buyer concerns about the rapid devaluation of an RV after purchase.

Critical to Winnebago’s success in becoming an industry giant was Hanson’s insistence of localizing and steamlining production processes.

Vertical Integration

Hanson’s ability to solve complex problems with simple, cost-effective solutions accounted for much of the company’s success. Production processes 65

In 1966, Winnebago motor homes began rolling off the assembly line priced at half the retail cost of competitors’ models.

were redesigned and streamlined towards vertical integration.

When Hanson entered the travel-trailer business, nearly all manufacturers served primarily as assemblers relying on outsourced parts to build an RV. Hanson’s experience with Stitchcraft demonstrated that production processes could be improved by fabricating as many parts as possible at Winnebago Industries. “Doing the majority of the work ourselves in-house has led to substantial cost savings, which is passed on to the buyer,” said former CEO Gerald E. Boman in a 1972 interview. Winnebago Industries would soon manufacture all components for their products except the chassis, appliances and power units. Winnebago’s corporate culture became one of refining cycles of innovation, streamlining, deeper product knowledge and sales expansion.

Thermo-Panels, for example, debuted in 1963 as an aluminum and plywood laminated sidewall panel with a polystyrene core that was lighter, stronger and a better insulator. Once built to correct specification, electrical, cabinetry and other components were added in a vertically integrated fashion. In 1966, Winnebago motor homes began rolling off the assembly line priced at half the retail cost of competitors’ models. Vertical integration precipitated a 91-percent increase in Winnebago sales in 1967.

In 1968, a new facility, called “Big Bertha,” opened on the 60-acre Winnebago Industries campus. The plant has now grown to include 20 buildings with 2 million square feet of manufacturing space.

Spreading Economic Diversity In recent years, the company has opened branch plants outside Forest City for the first time in five locations across the U.S. Three of these facilities produce specific models within the Winnebago Industries tradition of vertical integration, and the other factories feed products into the Forest City manufacturing and assembly plant.

The first offshoot facility was established after SunnyBrook, a motor home manufacturer located in Middlebury, Indiana—a town with 3,420 residents—was acquired in 2010. The Middlebury plant produces all of Winnebago’s towable RVs and employs more than 280 workers.

In 2014, a branch plant manufacturing Winnebago Class B motor homes was opened in Lake Mills, Iowa, a town with 2,100 residents also in Winnebago County. Class B is the smallest type of RV, which uses a cargo van as the base and is commonly known as a camper van. This factory employs 50 people.

Recently, Winnebago Industries acquired a closed plant in Junction City, Oregon, (5,500 residents) which manufactured RVs for a now-defunct company, and reconfigured the facility to begin producing high-end diesel 66

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A Winnebago employee works on Winnebago D-22 in the “Big Bertha” production facility in the late 1960s. The D-22 included Thermo-Panels, a key innovation to the success of Winnebago Industries.

Photo: Winnebago Industries

motor homes later this year.

“To improve our efficiency and continue our growth for over three years, we needed to get the diesels out of here (Forest City),” said Scott Degnan, Winnebago’s Vice President of Sales and Product Management, in an interview last January in the Eugene Register-Guard. “That’s why we chose to pull the diesels out of Forest City and into Junction City into a facility that is accustomed to building these big, complicated machines.”

Additionally, there are two new plants nearby manufacturing parts for the main factory. In Charles City, Iowa (7,500 residents), Winnebago Industries employ 125 workers who, since 2014, have been producing hardwood components, which are then shipped 60 miles to Forest City.

In 2015, 70 positions were relocated from Forest City to Waverly, Iowa, to provide wiring services for the 12-volt electrical systems in Winnebago RVs. The units are shipped 100 miles to the main plant for installation.

In all instances, the new plants have been located in small towns and cities and, as Winnebago Industries has done since its origin, will help stem the ongoing population shift to larger urban centers.

[T]he new plants have been located in small towns and cities and, as Winnebago Industries has done since its origin, will help stem the ongoing population shift to larger urban centers.

Housing and Philanthropy As Winnebago hired more employees and Forest City’s population increased, Hanson countered the growing affordable housing shortage.

Winnebago Industries sponsored the J Street Project, which opened in 1962 and consisted of 14 houses that could be purchased by Winnebago employees for no money down and $99 per month.

Between 1960 and 1970, Forest City’s population grew by a third to 3,841 67

No doubt Winnebago Industries enabled Forest City to grow and prosper. The town almost doubled its population from 2,930 to 4,430 between 1940 and 1990.

residents. During this period, Hanson worked with local planners to create a new neighborhood, aptly named Westgate because of its proximity to the west gate of the Winnebago manufacturing complex. The new subdivision opened in 1970 with 60 lots where Winnebago constructed modular homes.

The company decided against continuing with this experimental product.

Today, there are about 250 traditional homes in the neighborhood.

Hanson’s vision for Forest City extended beyond employment and business growth. He helped build community and improve local culture through significant philanthropic efforts, during his lifetime and after he passed away in 1996, through the John K. and Luise V. Hanson Foundation.

An early project was the construction of a YMCA in the 1980s. Typically, the YMCA organization doesn’t consider municipalities with fewer than 25,000 people, but Hanson’s gift to the project was sizable enough for a variance to be granted.

The Hanson Foundation currently has assets of more than $60 million and continues to support community projects. In 2013, for example, the foundation contributed $2.98 million to local community projects, including $400,000 to construct a new emergency services facility, which now houses the fire department and ambulance service.

Since its inception, the Hanson Foundation has provided over $44 million to advance culture, the arts, education, social services, and other important causes in and around Forest City.

Back to the Future The upturn in sales in the motor-home industry between 2008 and 2015 was due largely to the fracking boom in North Dakota.

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From obscurity in the small-town Midwest, Winnebago Industries became the overall top-selling manufacturer of motor homes since 1974. Last year, Winnebago ranked third in sales nationwide.

Looking forward, the company re-launched an updated version of the Brave, one of its most popular models from the 1970s, along with a larger, similarly styled sister model, the Tribute. The new Brave is sleeker and larger than the original, but maintains the prominent eyebrow styling and color schemes. Both the Brave and Tribute were awarded RV Business magazine’s 2015 RV of the Year. Remarkably, Winnebago Industries is the only manufacturer to win the Recreational Vehicle Dealer Association’s Quality Circle Award every year since the company’s founding.

Winnebago Industries hopes that the retro look of the Brave and the Tribute, together with today’s appliances and technology, will capitalize on the nostalgia market and revive market dominance.

No doubt Winnebago Industries enabled Forest City to grow and prosper.

The town almost doubled its population from 2,930 to 4,430 between 1940 and 1990. Since then, the number of residents has declined but by less than 1 percent, which is not statistically significant. At the same time, most rural

towns and cities across the U.S. lost residents in significant numbers.

Winnebago has been the town’s largest employer since the 1960s. By 1968, Winnebago had grown from a failing company with 17 employees, when taken over by Hanson, to a robust venture with 1,252 workers. By 1978, there were more than 3,500 employees. Today, the company employs about 2,680 employees nationwide and will add 200 more when the plant in Oregon opens. Currently, about 2,150 people work at the Forest City facility—fewer than 40 years ago, due to technological improvements in manufacturing.

The long-term challenge for all industries will be how to balance employment and automation. Taken to its logical conclusion, robotics will enable companies to manufacture products with zero workers. But that also means there will be zero customers, since no one will have a job.

In the foreseeable future, Winnebago shows how business leaders in rural areas across the country can defy the demographic odds. In North Dakota, for example, access to cheap, reliable energy makes manufacturing a viable option. There are also growing high tech and unmanned aerial vehicle sectors, which provide conditions for many similar and related businesses.

Lastly—and indeed first in historical importance—is North Dakota’s status as one of the top agricultural producers nationwide. More value-added companies in this sector, and the others mentioned above, might well succeed—if Hanson’s business savvy, marketing acumen, practical innovation and community building are imitated. ±

A Winnebago employee works in the CAPCO (Creative Aluminum Products Company) facility located on the Winnebago main campus in Forest City. CAPCO creates structural and trim pieces used in the construction of Winnebago motor homes. Photo: Winnebago Industries

The long-term challenge for all industries will be how to balance employment and automation.

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Benedictine

Walker Percy: Novelist as Cultural Physician & Oblate R. Jared Staudt, PhD Visiting Associate Professor, Augustine Institute, and Catechetical Resource & Training Specialist, Archdiocese of Denver

“N

The Moviegoer Walker Percy (Alfred A. Knopf)

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ow in these dread latter days of the old violent, beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world, I came to myself in a grove of young pines.” With these words, Walker Percy begins his novel Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Percy hearkens back to the beginning of the “Divine Comedy” by Dante: “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Of course, both writers are describing more than a personal midlife crisis.

They are chronicling, in artistic form, crisis points in Western Civilization.

Unlike Dante, Percy’s protagonist doesn’t get to experience the Paradiso but remains marooned in the social ruins of contemporary life in fictional Paradise, Louisiana.

In 1962, Percy’s first published novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award, prevailing over Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey—despite opposition from Alfred A. Knopf who published The Moviegoer and preferred another of his titles in the running. In Percy’s acceptance speech, he described his book as “a modern restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.” In 2005, TIME Magazine named The Moviegoer one of the best English-language books published since 1923.

Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book was published—not

by Knopf—in 1983. The New York Times reviewer called him “our greatest Catholic novelist alongside Flannery O’Connor.” Four years later, another Times reviewer said Percy is “one of our most talented and original authors,”

This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “scientific humanism.”

That won’t do. A poor show.

Life is a mystery, love is a delight.

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Love in the Ruins Walker Percy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Thanatos Syndrome Walker Percy (The Franklin Library)

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who is “more of a philosophical novelist in the European tradition than a straightforward narrative storyteller.”

Although well known for his fiction, few readers are aware that Percy became a Benedictine oblate—which is a lay member of a Benedictine monastery who lives in the world while striving to unite outer work and inner prayer as modeled by the sisters and monks. Throughout his career, Percy advocated reuniting what had been torn apart, which was causing increasing social ailments: body and soul, faith and life. The Benedictines provide a vibrant example of holistic Christian life.

Thomas More, the main character of two of Walker Percy’s novels—Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome—is a psychiatrist and wayward Catholic who is sexually broken, a witness to cultural collapse across society and on a personal path toward healing. As such, More embodies the central themes of Percy’s fiction: More’s name is deliberately the same as the renowned English saint and martyr, as portrayed in the famous play “A Man for All Seasons.” In fact, in the novels More considers himself a white, Anglo-Saxon Catholic. Unlike Sir Thomas More, however, More stumbles through the contemporary crisis of culture, rather than standing firmly against disintegrating forces.

More is the psychiatrist that Percy never became. Percy graduated from Columbia University’s medical school in 1941, but never practiced after contracting tuberculosis as an intern. While recuperating for several years in a sanatorium in upstate New York, Percy read literature and philosophy intensely, which led him and his wife to convert to Catholicism in 1947.

He also converted his career from science to art via fiction, which provided a diagnostic role deeper than medicine. Instead of treating physical illness, Percy used More to investigate the moral and spiritual woes of our culture, both through the character’s personal problems and the issues inherent in the situations in which the author places his main character. More is a fractured genius—making breakthrough discoveries, but also struggling in his marriages and relationships, turning unsuccessfully to distractions and dependencies to cope.

In Love in the Ruins, Percy presents us with a society in decline, consumed by bitter conflict. More struggles with alcoholism and depression, is caught between three women, and fears that his invention, the ontological lapsometer (a “stethoscope of the soul”), will fall into the wrong hands. At the same time, Paradise is being torn apart by race-motivated terrorism. More does find peace and some healing, but these are temporary.

In the sequel novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy ups the stakes of his main character’s dilemmas by confronting More with a conspiracy upon his return home to Feliciana, Louisiana, after serving two years in prison for illegally selling prescription drugs. The scheme involves seeding the local

drinking water with a compound that reduces crime rates and improves psychiatric conditions, but also causes people to become childlike and therefore more easily controlled.

Percy uses this scenario to show how spiritual malaise makes us vulnerable to social and sexual manipulation. The novel also continues Percy’s critique of scientism as another way materialists try (and fail) to treat spiritual ailments with physical remedies.

A key theme of both novels is the split between body and soul that we impose upon ourselves. Our daily life is largely material, and when we think of religious and spiritual things, we do so apart from the physical. In Love in the Ruins, Tom More reflects on a question from his wife (“My God, what is it you do in church?”): “What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.” Although he is a lapsed Catholic in the novel, More still recognizes the incarnational and sacramental unity of Catholicism, which has the power to reconstitute our fractured identity.

Percy’s novels explore the bowels of fallen humanity. These are not works for the faint of the heart, examining struggles such as sexual perversion, alcoholism and drug use (therapeutic or recreational), all of which reveal an underlying loss of self and the overwhelming of our culture by social maladies. Mental illness ran in Percy’s family, as both his father and grandfather committed suicide. In Percy’s medical and literary pursuits, he was interested in identifying and healing sickness. As in physical healing, the redemptive processes that restore the human psyche can appear hideous when the narrative lances spiritual boils and puss spews forth.

Percy also writes about the cultural confusion resulting from the ongoing loss of humanity’s long-rooted identity. On a personal level, Percy responded by finding a spiritual home in Catholicism and chose to settle in Louisiana where he set his novels. Although his fiction is not explicitly Catholic, the state’s traditional Catholic culture provides an important backdrop for the author’s exploration of secularism’s effects. Still, Percy’s work remains Catholic, not by preaching dogma but by revealing the nation’s crisis of faith, which has only deepened in recent years, increasingly distorting individual psyches. The growing acceptance of transgender identity—which is a psychiatric condition, not a civil-rights cause—and same-sex marriage are major symptoms of this social radicalism, which cuts us off from mankind’s spiritual and anthropological roots.

Percy established a long-term friendship with the Benedictine monks of Saint Joseph Abbey near Covington, Louisiana. He even taught at Saint

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

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There is this vague hunch at the back of my mind that St. B may have as much to tell this sorry century as he did the 6th [century].

Joseph Seminary College (where enrollment has grown to a record 138 students this year). “[T]he solemnity and purpose of the brothers at the abbey struck a deep chord [with Percy],” wrote Jay Tolson in Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, “their commitment represented an ideal of single-minded devotion and sacrifice that Percy hoped to emulate in his own work and life. And the monastic life had a powerful aesthetic appeal as well.”

In rare understatement, Percy wrote about St. Benedict’s relevance today: “There is this vague hunch at the back of my mind that St. B may have as much to tell this sorry century as he did the 6th [century].” Shortly before Percy died in 1990, he made his profession as a Benedictine oblate, formalizing his long relationship with the Abbey and enabling him to be buried in the monastic cemetery. ±

Grabbing Aholt of Walker Percy Although he never practiced medicine or psychiatry, Percy published a tongue-in-cheek psychoanalysis of himself in the form of a self-interview in “Questions They Never Asked Me,” collected in Conversations with Walker Percy. On display is Percy’s wit regarding faith amid cultural relativity and religious confusion: Q: What kind of Catholic are you?

A. Bad. Q: No. I mean are you liberal or conservative?

A: I no longer know what those words mean.

Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

A: I don’t know what that means, either.

Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

Q: Yes. A: Yes. Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

A: What else is there?

Q: What do you mean, what else is there?

There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.

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A: That’s what I mean.

Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.

A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.

Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?

A: Yes. Q: Why? A: It’s not good enough.

Q: Why not?

A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight.

Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Q: Grabbed aholt?

A: A Louisiana expression.

Bioethics

Multi-Parent Children?

Pondering the implications of three (or more) parent embryos Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the University of Mary

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n ethical Rubicon was crossed when the first in vitro fertilization (IVF)conceived baby came into the world in 1978. With human reproduction no longer limited to the embrace of a man and a woman, people felt empowered to take their own sperm and eggs, or those of others, and create their much desired children bit-by-cellular-bit. As they mixed and matched these cells, they soon were drawn into other twists and turns of the advancing technology, including screening the genes of their test-tube offspring and eugenically weeding out any undesired embryonic children by freezing them in liquid nitrogen or simply discarding them as laboratory refuse.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

G.K. Chesterton

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Recent developments have exacerbated this situation by offering additional options and choices for generating children, recasting human embryos as modular constructs to be assembled through cloning or through the creation of three-parent embryos, which was legalized in the United Kingdom last February. While cloning involves swapping out the nucleus of a woman’s egg with a replacement nucleus to create an embryo, three-parent embryos are made by swapping out additional cellular parts known as mitochondria through the recombination of eggs from two different women. Even more baroque approaches to making three-parent embryos rely on destroying one embryo (instead of an egg) and cannibalizing its parts so as to build another embryo by nuclear transfer.

We risk trivializing our human procreative faculties and diminishing our offspring by sanctioning these kinds of “eggs as LEGO pieces” or “embryos as LEGO pieces” approaches. Ultimately there is a steep price to be paid for the everexpanding project of upending our own beginnings and rupturing the origins of our children.

Part of that price includes the significant health problems that have come to light in children born from IVF and other assisted reproduction techniques. Researchers have found an overall doubling in the risk of birth defects for children born by these technologies when compared with rates for children conceived in the normal fashion.

For retinoblastoma, a childhood eye cancer, a sixfold elevated risk has been reported. Assisted reproduction techniques are also associated with heightened risks for a number of rare and serious genetic disorders, such as Beckwith-Wiedmann syndrome, Angelman’s syndrome, and various developmental disorders such as atrial septal and ventricular septal defects of the heart, cleft lip with or without cleft palate, esophageal atresia and anorectal atresia.

Considering the various harsh and unnatural steps involved in moving human reproduction from the marital embrace into the petri dish, it should perhaps come as little surprise that elevated rates of birth defects 76

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have been observed, even when certain genetic defects may have been previously screened out.

As children born by assisted reproductive techniques become adults, they are starting to be tracked and studied for various psychiatric issues as well. A growing number of young adults are vocalizing their strong personal concerns about the way they were brought into the world through techniques such as anonymous sperm donations, because they find themselves feeling psychologically adrift and deprived of any connection to their biological fathers.

It should be obvious how any approach that weakens or casts into question the integral connection between parents and their offspring will raise grave ethical concerns. Whether it be three-parent embryos, anonymous sperm donations or surrogacy, we need to protect children from the harmful psychological stressors that arise when they are subjected to uncertainties about their origins. As one fertility specialist bluntly commented: “As a nation, we need to get a conscience about what we are doing here. Yes, it’s nice when an infertile couple is able to build a family, but what about the children? Shouldn’t their needs be in the mix from the very beginning too? I think it is ridiculous that a donorconceived child would need to ‘research’ to find out their genetic origins. Give me a break. What if you had to do that? Is it fair?”

Beyond these immediate concerns about the wellbeing and health of our progeny, we face further serious concerns about our human future in the face of these burgeoning technologies. As procreation becomes reduced to just another commercial transaction, and our children become projects to be assembled piecemeal in the pursuit of parental desires, we invariably set the stage to cross another significant ethical line.

That bright ethical line involves the creation of humans who have inheritable genetic modifications (changes that are passed on to future generations). When the first three-parent baby is born, perhaps this year in Britain, we will have stepped right into the middle of that hubris-filled brave new world of manipulating the genetic traits of future children. We will have transitioned to a paradigm where biomedical experimentation on future generations is seen as acceptable and justifiable. Now is the time to ponder carefully the implications of our rushed reproductive choices, and to stand firm against the preventable injustices that inexorably flow from assisted reproductive technologies. ±

When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research.

There must be another way.

Shinya Yamanaka, PhD, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2012, for succeeding in reprogramming adult cells to behave as stem cells.

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Essay

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Keynote address at the “Mankind, Society and Peace: Radiating Respect and Peace from Monaco” conference in Monaco, October 3, 2015 Don Briel, PhD, Blessed John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of Mary

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oday, I will talk about the tragic character of modern culture and how contemporary education both reflects and helps impart this reality. It is impossible to assess the current state of higher education without considering its cultural context. This is an enormously complex issue and I will touch on only a few major aspects. As well, I speak primarily from an American perspective, but these issues now seem universal in expression.

This year marks both the 10th anniversary of the death of St. John Paul II and the 25th anniversary of “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” his decree on the nature and ends of the Catholic university. Surprisingly, after John Paul’s extraordinary funeral, which demonstrated the central power of his life and pontificate, these anniversaries have been so little commemorated. This collective amnesia is a strong feature of modern culture, perhaps reflecting the pope’s insight, expressed in his encyclical “Evangelium Vitae,” that we live in a culture that is essentially tragic, in which conscience has been darkened and many people have lost the ability to distinguish good from evil.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis

Loss of Wisdom At the heart of the problem is the loss of wisdom. In “Gaudium et Spes,” the Council Fathers noted that “the intellectual nature of man finds at last its perfection, as it should, in wisdom, which gently draws the human mind to look for and to love what is true and good. Filled with wisdom, man is led through visible realities to those which cannot be seen. Our age, more 79

than any of the past, needs such wisdom if all that man discovers is to be ennobled through human effort. Indeed the future of the world is in danger unless provision is made for men and women of greater wisdom.”

But the language of wisdom has virtually disappeared from contemporary culture. What has replaced it is the language of knowledge and information reflecting a fundamental emphasis, not on the contemplative dimension of human experience, but rather on the felt need for compulsive activity and the exercise of power—to make ourselves, in Descartes’ famous phrase, the lords and possessors of nature. This shift to a technological culture with its promise to transform the world was noted by Joseph Ratzinger with alarm in his reflections on the Second Vatican Council’s deliberations, perhaps most notably in “Gaudium et Spes.”

In “Choruses from the Rock,” T. S. Eliot described this shift from a contemplative vision of life and its larger ends to life pursued in a context of restless motion without understanding or direction:

For the first time in human history, we live in a culture that seeks to organize human experience without a spiritual foundation.

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness, Knowledge of speech but not of silence; Knowledge of words and ignorance of the Word, All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

This stark poetic description of a fundamental aimlessness in modern life reflects the English historian Christopher Dawson’s argument that we have moved beyond a 19th-century liberal culture to a 20th-century technological culture, which, as Ratzinger noted, poses considerable danger to humanity.

For the first time in human history, we live in a culture that seeks to organize human experience without a spiritual foundation. But as we know, cultures require organizing principles and are invested in new ways with the power to enforce them. We now live in cultures that again for the first time require that the deepest human questions—those of meaning, identity, rights, love, sexuality and gender, freedom, marriage, family, and education—be secured by utilitarian political calculations requiring the sovereign power of the state.

The state has now eliminated all mediating institutions such as the family,

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friendship, fraternal associations, churches and guilds that had earlier negotiated the nature and meaning of these essential human issues. No society prior to our own would have thought this cultural situation desirable or even imaginable.

Age of Self-Esteem New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his recent book The Road to Character, reflects on the age of self-esteem and the remarkable changes in expectations for what constitutes a successful life. In a poll of American high school seniors in 1950, 12 percent of students responded that they thought themselves to be very important persons. In 2005, 80 percent agreed they were very important. In 1976, fame ranked 15 out of 16 as life’s goal, but in 2007, 51 percent of young Americans reported that being famous was one of their top personal goals. The earlier versions of the Girl Scout’s handbook stressed an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-effacement and insisted that the chief obstacle to happiness comes from an overeager desire to have people think about you. The 1980 handbook was titled, “You Make the Difference,” and poses the following questions: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you feeling? Every option available to you through senior scouting can, in some way, help you to have a better understanding of yourself. … Put yourself in the ‘center stage’ of your thoughts to gain perspective on your own ways of feeling, thinking and acting.”

G. K. Chesterton would have been struck by the irony of this acute modern confidence in our self-awareness, as he noted in “A Fairy Tale” in Lunacy and Letters: “Every human being has forgotten who he is and where he came from. We are all blasted with one great obliteration of memory. We none of us saw ourselves born; and if we had, it would not have cleared up the mystery. Parents are a delight; but they are not an explanation. The one thing that no man, no matter how adventurous, can get behind is his own existence; the one thing that no man, no matter how learned, can ever know is his own name. It is easier to comprehend the cosmos than to comprehend the ego; it is easier to know where you are than who you are. We have forgotten our own meaning, and we are all wandering about the streets without keepers. All that we call common sense and practicality and worldly wisdom only means that we forget that we have forgotten. All that we mean by religion and poetry only means that for one wild moment we remember that we forget.”

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To know ourselves, we must look out of ourselves, for we are not our own measure. As Brooks points out: “From an older tradition of self-combat we move to self-liberation and self-expression. Moral authority is no longer found in some external objective good, it is found in each person’s unique original self. Greater emphasis is put on personal feelings as a guide to what is right and wrong. I know that I am doing right because I feel harmonious inside.

Something is going wrong on the other hand, when I feel my autonomy is being threatened, when I feel I am not being true to myself.”

People have become as processed as food.

Astrid Alauda

But the age of the selfie is not without fundamental pathologies, for within this culture is a pervasive if unconscious boredom manifested in significant symptoms of anxiety and depression. American university counseling centers report that over 50 percent of students seek assistance for manifesting severe psychological symptoms.

These social trends are deepened by emerging technologies that accelerate communication, creating an environment in which students are relentlessly connected—but not in the form of deep interiority or close friendship.

Social media have succeeded in creating a more self-referential “information environment,” in which one can create one’s own culture not only through the world of blogs but via a network of apps and webpages that cater to one’s self-defined images and needs. Brooks notes Yahoo’s latest slogan: “Now the Internet has a personality: It’s You,” and Earthlink’s parallel message: “Earthlink revolves around you.”

Cultural Conditions Undermining Wisdom I suggested that university education both reflects and reinforces culture’s deepest assumptions. I would like to explore some aspects of the modern university that contribute to the tragic character of modern culture. For these cultural conditions have in themselves, and especially in their convergence, the power to undermine the search for wisdom in the modern university in three main ways: 1. Fragmentation: The university has abandoned its traditional commitment to the pursuit of the unity of knowledge, to the assumption that it was necessary to know the ordered relations of all aspects of reality in order to understand any portion of it. There is a presupposition that information is now so extensive, expansive and complex that knowledge is always inadequate and partial. This results in an emphasis on narrowly specialized research into increasingly limited fields of study. Cardinal Newman had stressed the im82

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portance of the circle of knowledge in which each discipline would be defined in a dynamic relation of influence and limit, secured by its relations to the whole. But today the university has become a multiversity without any unifying principles or communal identity.

By design, education is both partial and incomplete. Newman argued that a person narrowly trained only in one field is not competent even there, for he lacks the sense of the limits of that disciplinary perspective’s ability to account for complex realities.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre reiterated Newman’s argument, noting that many of the most dramatic failures of recent history were conducted by highly but narrowly trained experts from the most selective universities of the West. Not only did they assume that technology could impose a solution—for example, a military one in Iraq—but also that it wasn’t necessary to understand the complexity of religious tensions in order to establish a new political regime. The same is true in finance where the recent economic crisis was largely due not merely to technical failures but more to an overarching failure to grasp the interdependent relations among a wide range of cultural forces.

2. Compartmentalization: The contemporary university shares in and fosters the compartmentalization that marks the wider culture. There is a fundamental separation of the work of intellectual instruction, counseling, residential experience and moral formation at most American universities. The ideal is no longer the pursuit of an integration of these varied aspects of life and thought, but rather a balance among them determined, not on the basis of an ideal sustained by a tradition, but instead on the basis of autonomous preference.

[M]any of the most dramatic failures of recent history were conducted by highly but narrowly trained experts from the most selective universities of the West.

3. Instrumentalization: University education has been reduced to the acquisition of the technical skills necessary to fulfill specialized professional responsibilities required for financial success and personal influence. Again, the irony is that this narrow specialization has resulted in an inability to form adequate judgments, not only about a whole range of human problems—military, diplomatic, financial and academic—but also about oneself.

In order to evaluate these conditions and respond in light of the insistence on the central importance of the unity of knowledge and the ultimate complementarity of faith and reason in “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” it may be useful to reconsider the Catholic approach to the nature and ends of education, as articulated clearly in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

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Three Ends of Liberal Education

The promise of education—of leading out from an intuition of the nature of the truth to its deeper articulation and integration—can be contrasted with the modern emphasis on mere instruction, the acquisition of isolated facts and practical skills.

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In Happiness and Wisdom: Augustine’s Early Theology of Education, theologian Ryan Topping recently identified three ends of liberal education in Augustine’s thought. The first immediate end is “the acquisition of moral and intellectual virtue; these are the skills and dispositions that enable a student to think, feel and act in ways that promote the flourishing of human life.” Of course, for Augustine and Aquinas, the development of intellectual virtues presupposed and depended upon the complementary acquisition of moral virtues. One cannot make progress in true intellectual life without the development of moral habits of discipline: obedience, charity, perseverance, courage, temperance and prudence. And because all knowledge has to be ordered to its final end, the knowledge of God alone makes possible the beatitude for which we were made. Thus there can be no separation of the intellectual and moral virtues.

What is immediately striking in the thought of both of these great Church doctors is the central importance of order and unity. Aquinas would later note that we have admiration for the ordered nature of existence that has its origin and end in God. That admiratio, or wonder in the coherence of all the created order in its divine source and end, evokes a delight in the soul and mind, for it includes the hope of attaining the knowledge of what we desire to know. The promise of education—of leading out from an intuition of the nature of the truth to its deeper articulation and integration—can be contrasted with the modern emphasis on mere instruction, the acquisition of isolated facts and practical skills.

The second or proximate end is “the formation of a community of pious learners,” which encourages the life of friendship and shared inquiry. For we are not autonomous knowers but rather, as Aquinas said, we are mendicant knowers in that all knowledge comes to us as a gift and then is realized in a community of friendship. (As St. Paul insisted in 1 Cor. 4:7, “What do you have that has not been given to you?”) As Christopher Blum noted, the time spent studying at university is particularly attuned to the needs of friendship.

University teachers who “find it difficult to cultivate friendship and practice it as a high ideal are unlikely to be able to understand, much less shape, the lives of their students, whose whole collegiate lives are engulfed in friendship’s concerns.” But in compartmentalizing the work in higher education, the concerns of friendship no longer inform the life of the university or the relations among students and teachers. The concerns for friendship are now merely private issues.

The third end of liberal learning is directing intellectual inquiry to its final end of happiness. Aquinas shared Augustine’s fundamental insight that

knowledge of creaturely things without knowledge of the creator was not merely disordered but ultimately subversive of the wisdom for which we were made. He warns against the vice of discrete curiosity, that immoderate desire for the knowledge of things without their fuller context and final end, that is knowledge of God expressed in beatitude. And he insists that the task of studiousness is to restrain that unbridled desire for knowledge without a grasp of its ordered relations. It is in this context that we can understand Augustine and Aquinas’ emphasis on the fact that there is only one teacher, the Christ, who offers not a knowledge of words, but as the Word Himself illumines that inner desire for the truth at the heart of our being.

Curiosity Killed Contemplation In contrast, both scientific reform in the 17th century and the Enlightenment a century later stressed the value of curiosity as a restless desire for new explanations. The new sciences offered the rewards of power, control and prosperity resulting from the emphasis on natural or physical causation. As such, they inevitably undermined the foundational emphasis on the contemplation of all knowledge within the context of its divine origin and end.

Francis Bacon asserted the primacy of the experimental method over that of metaphysics and theology, arguing that: “Those, therefore, who determine not to conjecture and guess, but to find out and know; not to invent fables and romances of worlds, but to look into, and dissect the nature of this real world, must consult only things themselves.”

The consequences of this shift have had enormous implications for Western culture, for as Christopher Dawson noted:

Aquinas shared Augustine’s fundamental insight that knowledge of creaturely things without knowledge of the creator was not merely disordered but ultimately subversive of the wisdom for which we were made.

“The Western mind has turned away from the contemplation of the absolute and eternal to the knowledge of the particular and the contingent. It has made man the measure of all things and has sought to emancipate human life from its dependence on the supernatural. Instead of the whole intellectual and social order being subordinated to spiritual principles, every activity has declared its independence, and we see politics, economics, science and art organizing themselves as autonomous kingdoms which owe no allegiance to any higher power.”

The new knowledge did not directly attack the old and in this Bacon was typical, but he radically separated the claims of faith and reason and so contributed to the dissociation of sensibility, the fundamental severing of facts from values. T. S. Eliot described this as a peculiarly modern corruption, which undermined the credibility of all knowledge that is not empirical and experimental, thereby dissociating us not only from God but from ourselves.

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Fractured State of Today’s University

[Harvard] “teaches students but does not make them wise,” for the modern university “has willingly surrendered its moral authority to shape the souls of its students.”

Harry R. Lewis, former dean of Harvard College

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Now we come to the modern university that is at once instrumentalized, fragmented and compartmentalized. The humanistic dimension of its earlier tradition was expressed in the concern for the interdependence and interpenetration of the various disciplines, which required a contemplation of their ultimate ends. This has been replaced by an emphasis on the search for new information, by a fundamental emphasis on practical knowledge and the acquisition of skills that will guarantee a life of influence and economic security. There is a privileging of “new” knowledge, of “cutting-edge” research and a new emphasis on the power of the specialized expert. No longer are we bound to reflect upon this new knowledge and evaluate its moral implications and consequences. We must move ruthlessly to apply this knowledge in the name of progress. The larger questions of meaning and truth have been reduced to private values that have no legitimacy in the academy, except as political terms. But this also means that the university can no longer provide an education in moral reflection, in opening to wisdom that was assumed essential during all prior ages.

We are now in a situation in which the university is no longer committed to forming good persons but people capable of functioning in the discrete spheres of modern society. As Harry Lewis, the former dean of Harvard College, noted, universities are no longer concerned with the practices of virtue but rather with issues of health and safety. Their ambition is not the formation of the good person but the “well” person. Harvard, he argues, “teaches students but does not make them wise,” for the modern university “has willingly surrendered its moral authority to shape the souls of its students.”

But can such an education truly promote human flourishing and the pursuit of a common good leading to peace and mutual respect? In a message to American bishops in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI insisted that “the essential task of education at every level is not simply that of passing on knowledge, essential as this is, but also of shaping hearts.” There is, he added, a need to “create new and effective networks of support” in order to confront the dissociations of the experiences of many young people in order to assist them to see, to articulate, to live the harmony of faith and reason “capable of guiding a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and virtue.” This same insight had been expressed by John Paul II in Sapientia Christiana: “Christian wisdom … continuously inspires the faithful of Christ zealously to endeavor to relate human affairs and activities with religious values in a single living synthesis.

Under the direction of these values all things are mutually connected for the glory of God and the integral development of the human person, a development which includes both corporal and spiritual well-being.”

Mankind, Society & Peace Now I would like to turn to the title of our conference, “Mankind, Society and Peace: Radiating Respect and Peace from Monaco.” The pursuit of mutual respect and peace requires more than a university education marked by the threefold pattern of fragmentation, compartmentalization and instrumentalization. Such an education offers an account of reason that Benedict XVI described as “deaf to the divine and that relegates religions into the realm of subcultures,” and as a result is “incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures that our world so urgently needs.” And such a dialogue requires not merely the search for a political compromise among competing interests, but rather a deep sense of an integral humanism in all of its diverse expressions. This humanism will not be a byproduct of mere technical training or intellectual curiosity. Its principal expression and credibility will arise from a form of witness—not the proposal of a theory.

Let me cite Pope Benedict XVI one final time, for his insight about the work of the university as a work of intellectual charity provides a basis for the Church’s renewal of university education. In his address to American educators in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2008, the pope insisted that the university’s task of intellectual charity (an important phrase used earlier

by Pope John Paul II) focus on “fostering the true perfection and happiness of those to be educated” and thus “upholds the essential unity of knowledge against the fragmentation which ensues when reason is detached from the pursuit of truth.”

The work of intellectual charity has as its accompaniment not merely the virtue of faith but also hope, for as Benedict noted, “Once their passion for the fullness of truth has been awakened, young people will surely relish the discovery that the question of what they can know opens up the vast adventure of what they ought to do. Here they will experience ‘in what’ and ‘in whom’ it is possible to hope and be inspired to contribute to society in a way that engenders hope in others.” Of course, one cannot help being reminded of John Paul II’s repeated description of himself as a witness to hope in a century whose final legacy might well be fear.

Cardinal Newman argued that the university requires the Church for its own integrity, not merely to add a religious value to its secular concerns 87

but rather: to bring the ordered relations of faith and reason to bear upon teaching and research, to enable anew a consideration of the final end of all human life and learning, and to recover the integrity of the intellectual and moral virtues in the lives of students and faculty.

But we are conscious of the fact, again as Benedict reminded us, that the Church is now in the position of a creative minority within a secular culture, and no longer the creator and sustainer of culture. How might we think about the task of working within predominantly secular cultures while seeking to bear witness to a new and always emerging cultural possibility?

At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge that the Church is in the condition of a creative minority even within many of her own institutions that have inexorably taken on the basic presuppositions of secular cultures. Recognizing this historical fact requires us to move beyond institutional maintenance to a new and more creative experiment in cultural renewal.

Today’s Culture as Tragic I would argue that the tragic character of contemporary culture and the various reductionisms in the today’s university require a more radical response than merely attempting to add a set of values to complement this narrow vision. Rather, the vision itself must be reconceived in a more radical way—in fact, in the way of wisdom. This would not require a confrontation with the secular university, but rather the establishment of a coherent, attractive witness within it. Such opportunities will vary, but the postmodern language of diversity often provides an opening for a new encounter with Catholic thought and culture. It is simply not enough to attempt to recover a role for theology in the university. What we have lost is not merely a sense of a place for the discipline of theology, but rather the very idea that a unity of knowledge and the ultimate complementarity of faith and reason are conceivable.

We suffer not so much from an intellectual crisis, but rather a crisis of the imagination.

If we truly seek to transform higher education in order to radiate respect and peace, then we need to find ways of forming integrated lives to insure 88

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that young people will be inspired, not merely to seek a political reduction of conflict and the expansion of tolerance, but also to witness an interior peace in their lives and radiate it to others. As Gregory of Nyssa stressed in the 4th century, “Once we subject the wisdom of the flesh to God’s law, we shall be recreated as one single man at peace. Then, having become one instead of two, we shall have peace within ourselves.” Refusing to acknowledge the role of religion in contemporary cultures renders real dialogue of cultures impossible. Then no genuine pursuit of mutual respect and peace is possible.

Certainly one of the primary means to implement this recovery of imagination is the work of the university assisted by the presence of the Church.

Ours is perhaps not a heroic age, not one of high ambition and courage that might justify the language of the great-souled. Nonetheless its dangers are increasingly self-evident and a response is urgently needed. Perhaps we can take some comfort in Christopher Dawson’s insight about the hope Christianity offers the world. As he noted in The Crisis of Western Education:

No man [or woman] should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Christianity … offers no immediate panacea for the complex malady of the modern world. It has eternity before it, and it can afford to take its time. But for that very reason a Christian culture is potentially far wider and more catholic than a secular one. It is God-centered, not man-centered, and it consequently changes the whole pattern of human life by setting it in a new perspective.

We may not be able to build cathedrals like the Catholics of the 13th century or write epics like Dante, but we can all do something to make man conscious of the existence of religious truth and the relevance of Catholic thought, and to let the light into the dark world of a closed secular culture.”

Renewal The renewal made possible by such an opening to the light of religious truth and the wisdom of Catholic thought will surely be incremental and uneven, as indeed it has been throughout the history of the world. And yet as Dawson makes clear, the Christian does not We suffer not so much from an focus on temporary or political solutions to the complex mysintellectual crisis, but rather a tery of human life and history, but rather on Christian hope crisis of the imagination. that makes possible a certain freedom and daring, which modest human calculations stifle.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that only a renewed university, one that integrates not only the widely diverse and increasingly specialized disciplines, but also the intellectual and the moral virtues, will allow us to address the tragic character of contemporary culture and achieve a more authentic, free and peaceful society. ± 89

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

C. S. Lewis 90

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Education

Educating Students in Poverty A Systemic Approach to Building a Culture of Success Brenda Werner, PhD Graduate Education Chair, University of Mary

W

e have long known the profound impact that socioeconomic conditions have on academic performance. A half-century of research shows that children living in poverty make up the largest portion of underachieving students at all grade levels. Family income and structure are still the top predictors of academic outcomes. Test scores and high-school graduation rates are significantly lower for children of the poor. As well, post-secondary performance is negatively affected—and this trend usually repeats in succeeding generations.

Changes in family structure in recent decades have decreased household income, especially for families headed by single mothers. According to the Brookings Institute, the poverty rate for children raised by a single mother is 45.8 percent, compared to 9.5 percent for children raised by two parents. This impacts both child development and behavior. As well, low-income families usually experience multiple traumas as children grow up, and these families are less likely than those in more affluent communities to have the necessary skills and resources needed to overcome trauma.

The critical role adults play in the healthy development of children and adolescents cannot be underestimated, according to research by Jack P. Shonkoff, MD, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Positioning a child to flourish early in life involves establishing a strong foundation, which includes developing essential skills such as focusing

Above, Carmela Ballantyne teaches multiple math strategies to a small group of 2ndgraders.

Opposite, Jason Hornbacher, PhD, the principal at Dorothy Moses, with students in the school’s playground.

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attention, planning, monitoring, delaying gratification, problem-solving, working in teams and self-regulating. Families are prime partners in the education process. Parents and even a child’s extended family have a direct, lifelong influence on learning, developing socio-emotional proficiency and nurturing healthy lifestyles.

Educating Diverse Students: Dorothy Moses Elementary

More students at Dorothy Moses consistently score at or above proficiency on the North Dakota State Assessment than peers across the district and statewide.

Opposite page, Shelly Feeney, a 1stgrade teacher, leads students grouped by reading level.

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The need for school-family partnerships is critical in schools where complex challenges threaten academic success. In Bismarck Public Schools, the state’s largest district, Dorothy Moses Elementary School (K-5) educates one of the most diverse student populations, mostly from low-income and highly transient families.

Remarkably, 48.8 percent of students at Dorothy Moses live at or below the poverty level, compared to 8.4 percent in Bismarck and 15 percent across North Dakota. (The 2016 federal guidelines set the poverty income level for a family of four, for example, at $24,300 or less.) More than half of the students at Dorothy Moses qualify for free or reduced lunch, compared with 24 percent of peers in the district and 31 percent statewide.

Dorothy Moses enrolls 339 students, including 32 African Americans, 214 Caucasians, 71 American Indians, 19 Hispanics and three Asians.

The yearly mobility rate at Dorothy Moses is 36 percent, which is more than double the district average (16 percent), in addition to the normal turnover as new kindergarten students enter and the 5th-graders transition to middle school. In total, more than 52 percent of students are new to Dorothy Moses every fall.

In January, Jason Hornbacher, PhD, the principal at Dorothy Moses, gave a presentation to the North Dakota Human Services Committee to provide an educational perspective regarding the mental health issues students and families experience, and the social and emotional impacts of these issues on student learning. “Prior to watching or listening to this,” Hornbacher asked the committee, “I want you to visualize yourself at your current age, current worldly experience and current jobs. Then put yourself in one of these situations and ask yourself how productive you might be going to work, learning something new, and remembering and applying it.”

Below are several excerpts from the presentation, titled “Walk, Walk, Walk in Their Shoes … Did You Know?”, based on testimony collected during a recent four-month period: • Thirty students have court orders stating that one or both parents are not allowed contact with the child, or that parental visits must be supervised through the Children’s Advocacy Centers of North Dakota.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Albert Einstein

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• Community agencies visited families 130 times to check on safety and other child support issues.

• Two sisters, ages 5 and 6, experienced their single mother going to jail for the third time in a month.

• An 8-year-old girl was abandoned by her mother for the second time this year. The child now lives with an unrelated, single mother in her neighborhood.

• On his first day of school, a 5-year-old boy stood up and walked out of his classroom. After being brought into the school office, the child yells, “He didn’t have to be so mean. My dad didn’t have to be so mean.

He could have just said that he was mad. He didn’t have to hit.”

• A 7-year-old boy is continually shuttled between his mother and grand parents. Three weeks ago, his grandmother passed away. At the end of every school day, the student waits outside to see who will pick him up.

• A single father took a second job delivering newspapers to provide for his child. Now he wakes his 7-year-old son up at 1:30 am and takes him along so the boy doesn’t have to stay home alone.

Exceeding Expectations We must … believe the philosophers, who say that only the educated are free.

Epictetus

The snapshots above portray the complex socioeconomic issues affecting student wellbeing and academic success. In response, the faculty at Dorothy Moses addresses student needs while simultaneously developing strong social and core academic skills. Remarkably, as a result, more students at Dorothy Moses consistently score at or above proficiency on the North Dakota State Assessment than peers across the district and statewide.

From the 2010 through the 2013 school year, 83.2 percent of Dorothy Moses students scored at or above proficiency in math, which was 4 percentage points higher than the Bismarck school district and almost 8 percentage points higher than peers statewide. Dorothy Moses students averaged 81.7 percent proficiency in reading, which was almost 3 percentage points higher than Bismarck and 6.5 percentage points higher than students statewide.

The question, then, is why do students at Dorothy Moses outperform peers who often attend schools with fewer socioeconomic challenges?

Relational Mentoring The principal and teachers at Dorothy Moses focus on relational mentoring with students. They also work with community partners to utilize available resources—including experts in health and human services, housing, business, and service or faith organizations—for students and their families.

These practices enable the faculty to take a holistic approach to education, which has proven effective.

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A weak academic foundation often results Percent of North Dakota Children in Poverty from environmental risk factors, such as

by Race/Ethnicity, 2000 and 2014 poverty, abuse and violence. These traumas 51% 2000 typically leave students underprepared for 46% 45% 2014 school work. Also hampered is the develData: U.S. Census Bureau opment of the social skills and executive 28% 28% functioning students need to navigate daily 27% 24% demands. “The most important thing children 17% 15% 12% need to thrive is to live in an environment of 11% 9% relationships that begins in their family, and Black American Hispanic Asian All ND White also extends out to include adults at childcare origin of children Indian any race centers and in other programs,” said Shonkoff “Building Adult Capabilities to Improve orth DakotainChildren in Poverty Child Outcomes. ” “What children need is for North Dakota Poverty Rate icity, 2000 and 2014 that entire environment of relationships to be

by Household Type, 2014 % 2000 invested in their healthy development.”

Source: Center for Social Research, NDSU 2014 41.5% Experts, such as Ann Gearity, PhD, at the Data: U.S. Census Bureau University of Minnesota, point to compelling 28% 28% evidence that when caring adults invest in 24% students,17% it is not too late to develop essential 19.6% 18.7% 15% 12% social and academic 11%skills.

9% “Children change 3.1% 1.7% 7.4% when care and environmental supplies Hispanic Asian Allwhen ND Whiteown developmental Nonfamily Other family Single female Single male Married couple Married couple change, orchildren their origin of households households with children with children without children with children any race capacities are repaired to permit better adaptation,” she wrote in a training manual for working with children who have experienced complex trauma. Relational intervention can repair core developmental capacities and so improve the mental skills underlying academic performance.

Investing in Human Capital

Due to high poverty levels, Dorothy Moses qualifies as a Title I school, which means it is eligible to receive federal funds to help improve academic performance. Dorothy Moses is one of nine Title I schools in the district and one of 93 statewide. Also, the school receives Title VII funds, based on the enrollment of Native American students. Principal Hornbacher invests Title funds in people rather than programs or technology. He hired Lisa Kadlec as family liaison to assist with home communication and strengthen the school/family partnership. He also hired Tracy Famias, a licensed school social worker, as dean of students. Hired as well was Josh Standing Elk, a Native American educator, to help struggling students learn study skills.

Instructional aides (full-time and part-time) were retained to work with teachers to provide tutoring and mentoring.

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“Family education is central,” said Kadlec in an interview. Since it is often difficult to get families to come to school conferences, “at music performance, we take 15 to 20 minutes to talk about the cultural piece, and how extended families provide support, and how important it is for parents to be involved.” Dorothy Moses has developed a deliberately welcoming climate.

“Everyone, from office staff to teachers, works to ensure that when students and families walk in the door, they feel welcome, not intimidated.”

A major concern at the school is identifying the barriers that prevent students from arriving on time and attending daily. Kadlec noted that transportation difficulties, for example, can keep students home.

“Sometimes students begin to form a pattern at a young age of missing school regularly,” said Famias in an interview. “When we investigate, we find a lot is going on. It is critical to intervene early and build trusting relationships with the student and family, so we can get to the heart of issues and get families the resources they need.”

Faculty works in collaboration to determine if needs are environmental, socio-emotional or academic, or a combination of these. They also model how students can self-regulate and problem-solve when facing challenges.

Connecting with Community Partners Lisa Kadlec, family liason, (center top) coordinates the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile program for student dental care. Christy Peterson, DDS, (right) volunteers her dental services with dental assistant Linda Stumpf (left).

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Community involvement is a crucial component of student and family support at Dorothy Moses. The local Rotary Club, for example, began participating as guest readers in the classroom. “When they got here, they saw the needs and they were back,” said Hornbacher. “They have established a valuable partnership with us in supporting children regularly, not a one-time shot.” Utilizing grant resources and other community partners, the school provides students with nutrition education and fresh fruits and vegetables. As well, the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile delivers preventative and restorative dental care for students and siblings under 21 years of age. For many children, it’s the first time they have been examined by a dentist.

Hornbacher’s professional experience—his spiritual calling to make a difference with students in poverty—has taught him the importance of believing in the power of a caring community. Hornbacher notes that Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed Congress recently, will enable

educators to use resources to address needs more systematically. “The additional focus on parents and families was present in the No Child Left Behind Act,” said Hornbacher, “but I believe ESSA will refocus attention on schools and districts. The idea that education is a team effort between the families, schools and community is a notion that will be explored more holistically.”

Differentiating Instruction

To address individual learning issues in schools that are increasingly diverse—in language, culture, academic readiness, interests, motivation and learning preferences—Dorothy Moses, as many schools, utilizes Differentiated Instruction (DI), which tailors instruction and support mechanisms to each student’s specific needs. Teachers also focus on creating a learning environment rich in formative assessment (practice tests and other forms of evaluation) to plan DI for each student. Teachers work closely with parents so that the implementation of DI is reinforced at home.

Intervention and Enrichment is a DI strategy, which was first introduced to teachers by Eleanora Hilton-Taylor, the Response to Intervention (RTI) coach at Dorothy Moses. Instructors focus on learning standards and academic basics according to each student’s strengths and weaknesses. Additional class time is allotted for small-group math and reading instruction to enrich student learning, and to provide additional targeted instruction and intervention by highly qualified teachers.

Grade-level teams of teachers begin with a common pre-assessment test to establish a baseline for each student. After teaching an academic standard, another test is administered. Academic standards define the skills and content knowledge that students are expected to learn in a subject at each grade level. Then Hilton-Taylor uses student scores to group students by readiness level: highest performing, on grade-level and below grade-level.

Math and reading core instruction is planned accordingly.

By the end of the third cycle of teaching and assessment, learning gains can be measured. Hilton-Taylor charted the results of this Intervention and Enrichment approach for all Dorothy Moses students. “Only three students, who suffered chronic absenteeism, remained below grade,” she said. “In the first school year (2013-14) we did only math, and last year (2014-15) we added English in certain grades. The end-of-year data for both school years showed consistent growth and pockets of excellence.”

In the 2013-14 school year, 76.2 percent of 4th-grade students at Dorothy Moses met or exceeded their end-of-year growth projection in math, compared to 65.8 percent of peers in the Bismarck district. That is a remarkable 16-percent positive differential.

“Seeing the successes over and over again kept us motivated,” said Hilton-Taylor, who praised the commitment of the faculty and staff at

In the 2013-14 school year, 76.2 percent of 4th-grade students at Dorothy Moses met or exceeded their end-of-year growth projection in math, compared to 65.8 percent of peers in the Bismarck district.

That is a remarkable 16-percent positive differential.

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Dorothy Moses and also added, “Without Dr. Hornbacher it could not have happened. He committed to providing the needed training and resources.”

Teachers and administrators worked together researching instructional materials to find the best matches for their students. “It is not a curriculum or text or set of worksheets we use,” Hilton-Taylor emphasized. “We gather the support materials teachers ask for and give them what they need.” Fourth-grade teachers Beth Urlacher and Carmela Ballantyne created math packets customized for parents at each child’s readiness level, so that parents could continue targeted practice at home.

“Intervention and Enrichment helps meet the needs of high-achieving students too,” said Ballantyne in an interview, “because after students master a standard, they do advanced work, which gives them the opportunity to score above grade level.”

Collaborating to Meet Student Needs Teacher collaboration is an empowering process, as teachers understand that the answers to many of their questions are somewhere within the walls of the school.

Jason Hornbacher, PhD

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Hornbacher credits his teachers for their willingness to collaborate professionally and extend their expertise and care beyond their respective classrooms for the benefit of all students. “The data indicates student growth, which is an obviously positive outcome,” he said. “Teachers collaborate to engage students in learning and they share successful instructional practices, all to the benefit of staff and students.” This open sharing flourishes in a school culture where teachers feel safe enough to take risks regarding the success or failure of a given lesson. Then they share these experiences with faculty members.

“In addition, staff view student grade-level performance as theirs and own the growth of all students,” observed Hornbacher. This approach enables teachers to share and then learn from each other, and also rely on each other to meet the varying needs of all students. “Teacher collaboration is an empowering process, as teachers understand that the answers to many of their questions are somewhere within the walls of the school.”

“Ultimately, the collaborative approach means more than saying good morning and sharing a well-defined lesson plan with the teacher next door,” Hornbacher added. He cited the group design of lessons, when several teachers sit down to discuss and plan instructional practices, as a crucial difference-maker.

In a group interview, the team of 1st-grade teachers related that the smallest student groups consist of those with below-grade-level skills. They receive targeted intervention at the same time as teachers challenge high achievers in other small-group settings.

Also, the groupings are flexible as progress continues. “We revisit the groupings every week and move students when appropriate,” said Shelly

Feeney, a 1st-grade teacher. She pointed out that the repeating cycles of small-group instruction (30 minutes of math and 60 minutes of reading instruction) and assessment help students hold onto the academic skills and concepts.

Intervention and Enrichment helps students at Dorothy Moses learn and move beyond expected growth in each learning standard. In this process, the most impactful investment has proven to be relational between teacher and student, and relational among educators who are engaged in vigilant assessment and reacting to that assessment in a supportive learning environment.

Principal Hornbacher joins a small reading group led by Tracy Famias, the school’s social worker.

Finding Balance in Doing It All The needs of students growing up in poverty are complex. Understanding this and meeting needs both require a system-wide effort—an ultimate juggling act involving the implementation of a systemic approach to maximizing resources, better utilization of community partners, engagement of parents and families, and the adoption of innovative differentiated instruction.

“It can be overwhelming at times,” noted Famias. “Working in an environment where students have experienced a high degree of trauma can also impact the adults working with kids.” Administrators and education leaders often remind faculty to take care of themselves and each other.

“Kids need stable, consistent adults who want to be there and want to do their work while not always feeling overwhelmed,” said Hornbacher. “The pacing is an art.” An art whose highest reward is seeing challenged children surmount life-limiting obstacles. ± 99

Jerusalem, Israel, November 3, 2015: Israeli soldiers guard one of the main streets in the old city.

Geopolitics

Why No Peace in the Middle East Palestinians’ Nakba Myth is Biggest Obstacle to Resolution Sol Stern, Author, Contributing Editor of City Journal and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

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specter is haunting any prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster.” In its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism.)

The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national

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narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western colonialism and racism.

There is only one just compensation for their long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their leftist allies: Turn the clock back to 1948.

This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed (indeed encouraged) to return to Jaffa, Haifa and all the other villages that Palestinian Arabs once lived in and that are now part of Israel.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it is also, as it happens, a dangerous myth—a radical distortion of history.

If words have any meaning, it is certainly accurate to describe the outcome of the 1948 war as a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Between 600,000 and 700,000 men, women and children—even more, depending on who is telling the story—left their homes. Palestinian civil society disintegrated. By 1949, the refugees had been dispersed to the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and other neighboring Arab countries. Many lived in tents in decrepit refugee camps, eking out a bare subsistence. They were denied the right to return to their homes by the new State of Israel, but they were also denied the most basic civil rights by their host countries.

During the 1948 war and for many years afterward, the Western world— including the international Left— expressed little moral outrage about the plight of the Palestinian refugees. This had nothing to do with Western racism or colonialism. The fighting in Palestine had broken out only two years after the end of the costliest military conflict ever, in which the victors exacted a terrible price on the losers. By that, I don’t mean that many (though not enough) Nazi officials and their “willing executioners” were punished.

Rather it was the 11 million ethnic Germans living in Central and Eastern Europe—civilians all—who were brutalized. They were expelled from their homes and force-marched to Germany by the Red Army, with help from the newly liberated peoples of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Moreover the terrible

[I]f I had another life, I’d want to be a Middle East specialist … because it would mean guaranteed permanent employment.

James Baker III

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This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.

Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League

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deed was carried out with the explicit approval of the victorious allies, including President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill.

Historians estimate that over a million German civilians died on the way.

Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two new countries, India and Pakistan. As a result, millions of Hindus and Muslims were forced to flee from one new state to the other. Hundreds of thousands died in this forced population transfer and its related violence. Against this background, even the most morally sensitive people in the Western democracies were not likely to be disturbed by the exodus of a little more than half a million Palestinians at the conclusion of a war launched by their own leaders.

In the 1940s, moreover, most of the international Left actually championed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was widely noted that the new state would be led by self-proclaimed socialists. The new state of Israel was supported by the Soviet Union and by the most progressive elements in the Truman administration. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were compromised by the fact that their leader in 1948, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, had been a Nazi collaborator during the war.

I. F. Stone, the most revered left-wing journalist of the day, was one of the most influential American advocates for the Zionist cause. I have in my possession a book by Stone called This Is Israel, distributed by Boni and Gaer, a major commercial publisher at the time. Based on Stone’s reporting during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the book has become a collector’s item by virtue of the fact that Stone’s fans want to forget that it ever existed. Of the four adoring biographies of the great muckraker published in the last two decades, only one even mentions that Stone wrote This Is Israel—and then shrugs off its significance in a few paragraphs.

It’s obvious why the book remains embarrassing to today’s leftist critics of Israel and Zionism. It opens with a foreword by Bartley Crum, the prominent American lawyer, businessman and publisher of PM, the most widely read progressive newspaper of the 1940s. Crum evokes “the miracles [that the Israelis] have performed in peace and war. … They have built beautiful modern cities, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa on the edge of the wilderness. … They have set up a government which is a model of democracy.” Crum’s friend and star correspondent, Izzy Stone, has “set down what he knows and what he has seen, simply, truthfully and eloquently.” We Americans, Crum concludes, “can, through [Stone’s] book, warm ourselves in the glory of a free people who made a two-thousand-year dream come true in their own free land.”

Accompanied by famed war photographer Robert Capa’s iconic images of male and female Israeli soldiers, Stone’s text reads like a heroic epic. He writes of newborn Israel as a “tiny bridgehead” of 650,000 up against 30 million Arabs and 300 million Muslims and argues that Israel’s “precarious borders,” created by the United Nations’ November 1947 partition resolution, remain

LEBANON Golan Heights

SYRIA

Haifa

Sea of Galilee

Mediterranean Sea West Bank

Tel Aviv Jerusalem

Dead Sea

Gaza Strip

ISRAEL JORDAN

EGYPT

Map of Israel and region, including the Gaza Strip, Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israelicontrolled Golan Heights.

Eilat

almost indefensible. “Arab leaders made no secret of their intentions,” Stone writes, and then quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam: “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”

Palestinian leaders reminded Stone of the fascists he had fought since the Spanish Civil War. He ticks off the names of several Nazi collaborators prominent among the Arab military units that poured into Palestine after passage of the UN partition resolution. In addition to the grand mufti, they included the head of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi el-Kaukji, who took part in the Fascist revolt against the British in Iraq in 1940 and then escaped to Berlin, where he recruited Balkan Muslims for the Wehrmacht. Another Palestinian military commander, Sheik Hassan Bey Salameh, was a “former staff officer under Rommel,” Stone writes. “Salameh had last appeared in Palestine in 1944 when he was dropped as a Reichswehr major for sabotage duties.” For good measure, Stone adds, “German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked [into Palestine] for the war against the Jews.”

And how does Stone explain the war’s surprising outcome and the sudden exodus of the Palestinian Arabs? “Ill-armed, outnumbered, however desperate their circumstances, the Jews stood fast.” The Palestinians, by contrast, began to run away almost as soon as the fighting began. “First the wealthiest families went,” Stone recounts. “While the Arab guerrillas were moving in, the Arab civilian population was moving out.” Stone blames the grand mufti for giving explicit orders for the Palestinians to abandon Haifa, which had

Stone blames the grand mufti for giving explicit orders for the Palestinians to abandon Haifa, which had the largest Arab community of any city assigned to the Jewish state under the UN’s partition plan.

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Nor could Stone have imagined that not one Arab country would move to absorb the refugees and offer them citizenship, or that the Palestinians’ leaders would insist on keeping the refugees locked up in the camps for the purpose of dramatizing their false Nakba narrative.

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the largest Arab community of any city assigned to the Jewish state under the UN’s partition plan.

What is most revealing about the book is the one issue that Stone does not write about: the fate of the Palestinian refugees. Stone shared the conventional wisdom at the time—that wars inevitably produce refugees and the problem was best handled by resettlement in the countries to which those refugees moved. Stone expected that the Arab countries to which the Palestinian refugees had moved would eventually absorb them as full citizens.

Such an outcome wouldn’t be perfect justice, but it would limit Palestinian suffering and open the doors to a reasonable and permanent settlement of the conflict. Stone also knew that Israel was in the process of absorbing an almost equal number of impoverished Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, most of whom had been forced out of their homes and lost all their property in places where they had lived for hundreds of years.

Stone could not have foreseen that for the next 62 years, the Palestinians would remain in those terrible refugee camps—not just in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but in Lebanon, Syria and present-day Jordan as well. Nor could Stone have imagined that not one Arab country would move to absorb the refugees and offer them citizenship, or that the Palestinians’ leaders would insist on keeping the refugees locked up in the camps for the purpose of dramatizing their false Nakba narrative.

Stone’s reporting on the 1948 war has turned out to be a pretty decent “first rough draft of history,” to quote publisher Philip Graham’s definition of good journalism. But that’s a judgment that Stone himself discarded, as the Left gradually abandoned Israel over the next 30 years and accepted the Palestinians’ portrayal of their military defeat in 1948 as the Nakba—another example of Western colonial oppression of the indigenous people of the third world.

In Stone’s later writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was at pains to forget what he had said in This Is Israel. Moving in lockstep with the Left, he turned into a scathing critic of Israel by 1967, castigating the Zionists for “moral myopia” and lack of compassion. His turnabout was so complete that by 1979, the West’s foremost champion of the Palestinians, Edward Said, paid homage to Stone and to Noam Chomsky as two of the few Jewish intellectuals who had “tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years.” The Columbia University scholar obviously didn’t know about, or didn’t want to know about, This Is Israel.

Revisionist historiography also emerged to try to nullify Stone’s earlier journalism. Starting in the mid-1980s, a group of self-styled “new historians” in Israel began debunking (or to use their favorite term, “deconstructing”) the official “Zionist narrative” about the 1948 war and the foundation of the state. The most influential of the revisionist historians was Benny Morris, whose 1987 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem became an

The Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier— now over 420 miles long and still under construction—built by the Israelis to protect its citizens against terror attacks.

international sensation. Using a trove of documents in the Israeli state archives, Morris showed that not all the Palestinian refugees fled their homes in panic or were ordered out by their leaders. For example, during fierce battles between Israeli and Arab forces around the strategic towns of Lydda and Ramla, the Israelis expelled thousands of Arab residents and put them on roads leading to the West Bank. Morris also presented documented cases of atrocities by some Israeli soldiers and revealed that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had discussed the feasibility of “transferring” Arabs out of the areas assigned to the Jewish state by the UN. Yet unlike most of his left-wing revisionist colleagues, Morris also asserted that the Palestinian calamity and the refugee problem were “born of war, not by design.” Morris was—and is—a committed Zionist of the Left. He believed that as a truth-telling historian, his scholarly work might have a healing effect, encouraging Palestinian intellectuals to own up to their side’s mistakes and crimes. This process of mutual “truth telling” might lead to some reconciliation, perhaps even to peace. But Morris was shocked when Palestinian leaders launched the second intifada, with its campaign of suicide bombings, just as President Bill Clinton offered them a generous two-state solution at Camp David. Morris was also dismayed to discover that his scholarship on the 1948 war was being used by Palestinian activists and Western leftist academics to build up the Nakba myth. In a 2008 letter to the Irish Times, he wrote: “Israel-haters are fond of citing—and more often, mis-citing—my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections. …

In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947, [the Palestinians] launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

Christopher Hitchens

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[Palestinians] never really understood the Zionist claim to the land … [and Zionists] were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs’ nexus with the soil. … Thus, the Zionist– Palestinian conflict, which was the origin and remains the core of the Israeli– Arab conflict, has been characterized by a crude and brutal perceptional symmetry.

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims

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was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes. … On the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities.

“Most of Palestine’s 700,000 “refugees” fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops.

“The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became “refugees”—and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee)—was not a “racist crime” … but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.”

Coming from the dean of Israeli revisionist historians, this was a significant rejection of the Nakba narrative and, incidentally, an endorsement of Stone’s forgotten book.

Yet another path-breaking work of historical scholarship later appeared that, if facts mattered at all in this debate, would put the final nail in the coffin of the Nakba myth. The book is Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East program at King’s College London. Karsh has delved deeper into the British and Israeli archives—and some Arab ones—than any previous historian of the period. He deftly uses this new material to seal the case that their “catastrophe” in 1948 was, to a large extent, brought on by the Palestinians’ own leaders.

For example, using detailed notes kept by key officials in Haifa, Karsh provides a poignant description of an April 1948 meeting attended by leaders of Haifa’s Arab community, officers of the nascent Israeli military, the Jewish mayor of the mixed city, Shabtai Levy, and Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British military commander of Haifa. Levy, in tears, begged the Arab notables, some of whom were his personal friends, to tell their people to stay in their homes and promised that no harm would befall them.

The Zionists desperately wanted the Arabs of Haifa to stay put in order to show that their new state would treat its minorities well. However, exactly as Stone reported in This Is Israel, the Arab leaders told Levy that they had been ordered out and even threatened by the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by the grand mufti from his exile in Cairo. Karsh quotes the hardly pro-Zionist Stockwell as telling the Arab leaders, “You have made a foolish decision.”

In describing the battle for Jaffa, the Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv, Karsh uses British military archives to show that the Israelis again promised the Arabs that they could stay if they laid down their arms. But the mufti’s orders

again forbade it. In retrospect, it is clear that the mufti wanted the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa to leave because he feared not that they would be in danger, but rather if they remained in those key cities, it would provide greater legitimacy to the fledgling Jewish state.

Unfortunately, no amount of documentation and evidence about what really happened in 1948 will puncture the Nakba myth. The 67-year-old tale of dispossession serves a useful political purpose. It has been institutionalized now, an essential part of the Palestinians’ armament for what they see as the long political struggle ahead. It has become the moral basis for their leaders’ insistence on the refugees’ right to return to Israel, which in turn leads them to reject one reasonable peace plan after another. In the meantime, the more radical Palestinians continue to insist that the only balm for the Nakba is the complete undoing of the historical crime of Zionism—either eliminating Israel or submerging it into a secular democratic state called Palestine. (The proposal is hard to take seriously from adherents of a religion and a culture that abjure secularism and allow little democracy.)

Nor will the historical facts about 1948 impress the European and American leftists who are part of the international Nakba coalition. The Nakba narrative of Zionism as a movement of white colonial oppressors victimizing innocent Palestinians is strengthened by radical modes of thought now dominant in the Western academy. Postmodernists and post-colonialists have adapted for their own political agenda Henry Ford’s adage that “history is bunk.” According to the radical professors, there is no factual or empirical history that we can trust—only competing “narratives.”

For example, there is the dominant establishment narrative of American history, and then there is the counter-narrative, written by professors like the late Howard Zinn, which speaks for neglected and forgotten Americans.

Just so, the Palestinian counter-narrative of the Nakba can now replace the old, discredited Zionist narrative, regardless of actual history. And thanks to what the French writer Pascal Bruckner has called the Western intelligentsia’s new “tyranny of guilt”—a self-effacement that forbids critical inquiry into

On December 31, 2009, Palestinians protested the closure of the Erez Crossing to goods and traffic. Erez is one of the major crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which is shut down periodically when HAMAS (acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement), a Palestinian terrorist organization, instigates attacks on Israelis.

The next powerful force is, of course, sentimentality.

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The depravity of Hamas’ strategy seems lost on much of the outside world, which … blames Israel for the civilian casualties it inflicts while attempting to destroy the tunnels.

While children die in strikes against the military infrastructure that Hamas’s leaders deliberately placed in and among homes, those leaders remain safe in their own tunnels. There they continue to reject cease-fire proposals, instead outlining a long list of unacceptable demands.

Washington Post Editorial Board, July 23, 2014

An earlier version of this article was published as “The Nakba Obsesseion”

by City Journal.

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the real history of those national movements granted the sanctified status of “oppressed”—the Nakba narrative cannot even be challenged.

This makes for a significant subculture in the West devoted to the delegitimization of Israel and the Zionist idea. To leftists, for whom Israel is now permanently on trial, Stone’s 1948 love song to Zionism has conveniently been disappeared, just as Trotsky was once disappeared by the Soviet Union and its Western supporters (of whom, let us not forget, Stone was one). Thus Tony Judt was moved to write in The New York Review of Books—the same prestigious journal in which Stone began publishing his reconsiderations of Zionism—that Israel is merely an “anachronism” and a historical blunder.

Several years ago I visited the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. It is called Balata, and it is inside the city of Nablus. Many of the camp’s approximately 20,000 residents are the children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the Arab citizens of Jaffa who fled their homes in early 1948.

For half a century, the United Nations has administered Balata as a quasi-apartheid welfare ghetto. The Palestinian Authority does not consider the residents of Balata citizens of Palestine; they do not vote on municipal issues, and they receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. The refugee children—though after 60 years, calling young children “refugees” is absurd—go to separate schools run by UNRWA, the UN’s refugee-relief agency. The “refugees” are crammed into an area of approximately one square kilometer, and municipal officials prohibit them from building outside the camp’s official boundaries, making living conditions ever more cramped as the camp’s population grows. In a building called the Jaffa Cultural Center— financed by the UN, which means our tax dollars—Balata’s young people are nurtured on the Nakba myth and the promise that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors’ homes by the Mediterranean Sea. History has come full circle. During the 1948 war, Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini insisted that the Arab citizens of Haifa and Jaffa had to pack up and leave their homes, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state.

Now, the descendants of those citizens are locked up in places like Balata and prohibited from resettling in the Palestinian-administered West Bank— again, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state, this time by removing the Palestinians’ complaint of dispossession. Yet there is a certain perverse logic at work here. For if Israel and the Palestinians ever managed to hammer out the draft of a peace treaty, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, would have to go to Balata and explain to its residents that their leaders have been lying to them for 60 years and that they are not going back to Jaffa. That will be a very hard thing to do, even for the most enlightened and “moderate” Palestinian leader. Which, to state the obvious again, is one of the main reasons that there has been no peace between Israelis and Palestinians and no two-state solution. ±

Book Review

Breaking the Line Sports, Civil Rights & Civility Jesse Russell, PhD Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary

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n his great epic poem, “The Aeneid,” the Roman poet Virgil depicts a series of athletic events, known as the funeral games, in honor of the great Trojan hero Anchises, the “grandfather” of the Roman people. Amidst the commemorative foot and boat races and archery tournaments is a parade of Trojan youth in which the young men undertake military maneuvers in front of the adoring eyes of their elders. It is a seemingly strange scene, but it is extremely important to understanding why sports have been so important in the Western tradition. Sports are a deeply tribal phenomenon: We like to see our youth suited up in athletic armor, battling to bring honor to our communities. Politics might be war by other means, but so are sports. Electrifying high school basketball games among American Indian tribes tap into ancient feuds. A soccer team in Europe is often a sign of one’s politics, religion, ethnicity, and even what type of beer he or she likes to drink. Hockey is a way of life for many Canadians, so much so that even American hockey is largely Canadian. Sports in America—like race, religion and beer—have always been complicated, and no sport is as distinctly American and as distinctly complicated as college football.

In Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, Samuel G. Freedman presents a portrait of the men, women and events leading up to the 1967 Orange Blossom Classic, the Super Bowl of black college football.

We hear a moving story of two titans of the collegiate scene: the colossal Eddie Robinson of Grambling College (which became Grambling State University in 1974) and the lesser known but equally indomitable Jake Gaither of Florida A&M University (FAMU). Along with the two coaches, Freedman chronicles the stories of two quarterbacks: Grambling’s James Harris, who ended up having a roller-coaster career in the NFL, and FAMU’s Ken Riley, who went on to play for the Cincinnati Bengals and then coached for the Green Bay Packers in the 1980s. Breaking the Line depicts

Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights Samuel Freedman (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

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the struggle of these two teams from historically black colleges to gain recognition on the national stage, in light of the ongoing tragedy and hope of the civil rights movement. Freedman presents a window into a strongly black, definitively Southern and passionately American culture.

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) still to this day remain a mystery to those outside their orbit—how many Americans today even know they still exist? U.S. World and News Report lists 77 HBCUs in 2016. It is generally assumed that these schools continue to exist as underfunded institutions from which black students look longingly at the ivy-covered facilities at predominately white state and private schools. Freedman does not deny the tremendous disparity in finances, but more than anything, Freedman reveals a thriving black culture few other Americans are aware of. Grounded in the personalities of football coaches Robinson and Gaither, two men known for their religious devotion, calm demeanor, and puritanical self-control and good manners, what is most surprising about the two primary HBCUs in the book—Florida A&M and Grambling—is the rich, deeply conservative campus culture that thrived at both schools.

In their early years of coaching, Robinson and Gaither were able to shepherd their players away from risk and into classroom and church— even sending spies to make sure their players were in the pews and at class.

Robinson and Gaither taught their men that self-control and excellence, both on and off the field, would provide a “Double Victory” (a term used by black soldiers in World War II) of acceptance by white Americans through demonstration of athletic excellence. Robinson and Gaither’s practices were notoriously regimented and rigorous, as they trained their athletes like drill sergeants: shaping their boys into men. These coaches led by stoic and Christian example, and until the black community along with the entire country began to come apart in the 1960s, they were successful in doing so.

Following the players and coaches off the playing field, Freedman gives his audience a unique glimpse into the life of HBCUs before, during and after the Civil Rights movement. Despite the controversy over the quality of education in HBCUs, which arose in the late 1960s, Breaking the Line offers a portrait of the attempt to maintain the civilized and dignified academic climate at Florida A&M and Grambling, and tragically how this climate was often degraded by the civil rights movement that sought to improve it.

In one incident, as Grambling’s students are caught up in the protests of the late 1960s, a philosophy major quotes from Socrates’ final speech only to be shut up by a cruder, more radical peer. What is so humorous and significant about this scene is that it shows how a back-country black

Freedman reveals a thriving black culture few other Americans are aware of.

Opposite, from a Harris family scrap book: Above, 18-year-old James Harris (center) in late 1964 or early 1965, with his sister, mother and grandmother around him, signs a letter of intent to attend Grambling College, while football coach Eddie Robinson (far right) looks on.

Below, James Harris poses as quarterback of the Grambling Tigers.

Harris later played quarterback in the NFL for the Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Rams and San Diego Chargers. In his rookie season with the Bills, he became the first black player to start a season at quarterback in pro football.

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In his pregame ritual, Florida A&M’s coach, Jake Gaither, leads his team in the prayer he composed to the “God of the Rattlers.” A minister’s son who had aspired to be a lawyer until his father’s early death derailed the plan, Gaither brought both faith and eloquence to his gridiron career.

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college could produce such well-educated students. How many 21st-century college students—white or black—can quote from Socrates? How many American philosophy professors can quote Socrates today? It is this gentility and richness of a mid-20th century black community, which shared many of the same admirable values of the white community with whom it clashed, that provides much of the book’s poetry and pathos. Breaking the Line also illustrates how the movement for peaceful integration unintentionally led to the erosion of these shared values.

Throughout the work, Freedman narrates how the civil rights movement mutated into a violent Black Nationalist movement. Most interesting is that Freedman shows how much the angry black youth of the 1960s were fighting against not only the white establishment, but also against the older generation of blacks who wanted a more gradualist approach to reconciling with the white community. Breaking the Line contains hints that forced integration has not produced the result of two co-equal communities with rich and diverse traditions, but rather the destruction of any distinct ethnic community in America. Freedman cites Martin Luther King Jr., who worried

that total integration of American public schools would result in the loss of distinctly black communities and schools.

Both football and college have changed in America since 1967. Plagued by rape and cheating scandals, college football has come under scrutiny in recent years and is increasingly viewed as an obnoxious blight on American campuses. Some still see college football as the great American fall sport and celebration of American masculinity, while others view it as a hysterical cult appropriate to mad arenas of the waning Roman empire. Perhaps worst of all, we have lost the strongly American culture that produced men of honor and tenacity like Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither.

America has always envisioned itself as a great Roman Republic with, like the Romans, a fiercely tribal streak that often manifests itself in ugly ways. However, in light of the current political and racial crises we now face, our nation’s past injustices toward minority populations are not the most pressing issues du jour. Yes, the vigilante violence and even outright terrorism of white racism in the American South deserves remembrance and repentance. Accordingly, the story of breaking of the NFL’s color barrier makes Freedman’s book important. But Breaking the Line deserves a read not simply because it is a love letter to a great American sport and because of its insights into the civil rights movement. Significantly, the book also paints a vibrant portrait of a black Southern culture that has largely vanished: a robustly patriotic, determined, joyful and confident America that has tragically faded.

As such, perhaps Breaking the Line maps a viable way forward for the nation. In a recent New York Times article, “A Civil Rights Warrior, Armed With Spoons and Thank-You Notes,” Freedman writes about Mildred Moss, who taught a course called Social Usage at Grambling beginning the early 1960s. “With its rigid propriety, Social Usage could hardly have propounded a more subversive idea,” Freedman reports. “Black people, too, were worthy and capable of etiquette. Every Grambling student-athlete, wearing a coat and tie, using the correct fork, could make an implicit case for racial equality.”

As Rev. Delles Ray Howell, who played football at Grambling and then for the New York Jets and New Orleans Saints, comments in the article: “The approach was to prepare you for whatever situations could come up in life. Those classes gave you knowledge for things outside athletics.”

Imagine all colleges and universities preparing students this way today.

Imagine civil rights and civility shaping America’s future together. ±

Freedman mixes in revealing information about the cultures of the schools, their rivalries with other black colleges, sensitive portraits of the coaches and players, and an evocative description of a racial and political climate that Robinson and Gaither, each working quietly, did so much to alter.

Kirkus Starred Review

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A Conversation with Sam Freedman Samuel G. Freedman is the author of seven books, a columnist on religion for The New York Times and a professor of journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Freedman’s most recent book, Breaking The Line was published in 2013 to remarkable critical acclaim. Freedman’s first book, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School (Harper & Row, 1990), was a National Book Award finalist, and The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right (Simon & Schuster, 1996) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Samuel G. Freedman

n Jesse Russell: At the end of Breaking the Line, you provide a lengthy thank-you list to members of the HBCU community at Grambling and FAMU. Could you describe how you gained access to and reported about this community?

u Samuel G. Freedman: I reached out at the outset of my reporting, back in the summer 2006, to some of the key people at each university during the 1967 season. In some cases, I contacted them through intermediaries, like Richard Lapchick, a sports sociologist who had co-written Eddie Robinson’s autobiography, and Pat Toomay, a former NFL player turned author. They could vouch for my integrity to people who had never met me. I mean, not only was I white but I was northern rather than southern, and though I was a lifelong football fan, I’d never been a sports journalist. So there were a lot of legitimate reasons for people at the HBCUs to look askance at me initially.

Probably the strongest point of contact I had was my familiarity with the African-American Church from my 1993 book Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church. The pastor I wrote about, Rev. Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, graduated from an HBCU (Dillard University). And some of the important figures in my book, such as James Harris, were “PK”—a preacher’s kid. n Russell: A lot of people are unaware of the continued existence of HBCUs. What is the current status of historically black colleges in the U. S., and why are they often “under the radar”?

u Freedman: They were under the radar because almost all of them were

created during the years of legal segregation. They were part of the African-American invisibility that Ralph Ellison wrote about in his novel. And even many well-intended white northern liberals underappreciated the HBCUs because these white reformers were so (correctly) committed to overturning segregation and the concept of “separate but equal” in education that they needed to make the HBCUs sound inadequate. This was a view that Martin Luther King, Zora Neale Hurston, and innumerable other black intellectuals and activists thoroughly disputed.

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n Russell: College football has come under scrutiny recently because of cheating, exorbitant expense and rape scandals. At the same time, it is more popular than ever. Do you see a strong, prosperous future for “football on Saturdays”, and what challenges does college football face?

u Freedman: The sport is beyond prosperous. It’s a money-printing

machine. The challenge is to fairly compensate the players—who are disproportionately African-American—whose exploits on the field make money for TV networks, apparel and merchandise companies, coaches, and the colleges themselves. And the related challenge is to compensate the players without giving up on the ideal of a student-athlete and just turning college sports into the minor leagues.

n Russell: You suggest a couple times that the civil rights movement at large and the progress of black Americans in the NFL has not reached its goals.

What do you see as some of the primary obstacles to the success of black Americans in the NFL?

u Freedman: Actually, the NFL has a far better record than the top NCAA

colleges, because the NFL’s “Rooney Rule” requires teams to at least interview a minority candidate for a head coach or general manager opening.

But some recent studies point out that black assistant coaches overall don’t get promoted as often or as early as white assistant coaches with comparable records. And that depletes the pool of potential black head coaches.

n Russell: In your book, you present a contrast between the more conservative, Christian and modest culture of an earlier generation of black Americans, such as Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, and the more radical, disheveled and violent youth that came in at the tail end of the civil rights movement and the beginning of the Black Power movement. It almost seems as though there was as great a cultural conflict between generations in the black community as there was between the black and white communities.

Please comment with reference to the persistence of this divide in the black community—if, indeed, the divide still exists.

There definitely was a generational divide. The coaches I wrote about, Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, were proud men but reluctant to take public stands on civil rights. … [They] finally did do other things for the freedom movement through football.

u Freedman: There definitely was a generational divide. The coaches I

wrote about, Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, were proud men but reluctant to take public stands on civil rights. Their players had grown up in the era of Brown v. Board of Education, the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—despite all of which, segregation was still holding onto the South. So these players felt torn between their love for those coaches and the admiration they felt for athlete-activists like Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown. Part of my point in the book, though, is that Robinson and Gaither, feeling the discontent around them, finally did do other things for the freedom movement through football. ± 115

Book Review

Mercy in the City (& Town & Country) A Personal Guide to Practicing the Corporal Works of Mercy Andrea L. Gleiter Senior, English major, University of Mary

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Mercy in the City: How to Feed the Hungry, Give Drink to the Thirsty, Visit the Imprisoned and Keep Your Day Job Kerry Weber (Loyola Press)

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he topic of Kerry Weber’s book Mercy in the City interests me greatly because I wrestle with the same challenges. Mercy in the City is a firstperson account of Weber’s attempt to practice the seven corporal works of mercy in today’s New York City. The book won the Christopher Award for Excellence in Catholic Media.

Pope Francis continually reminds Christians that the poor are not to be forgotten. Like Weber, I am Catholic and the pope’s call resonates with me.

One of his most quoted statements is: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty, because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.” We must all take this exhortation seriously, regardless of religious denomination.

I am a busy college student struggling to find balance among attending classes, studying, working, staying in touch with family, exercising, spending time with my boyfriend, cooking, seeing friends, and—oh yes, I almost forgot—rest. Adding “serving the poor” to this might seem impossible.

Weber, however, meets this challenge as a busy young woman living in a busier city with 11 times as many people as North Dakota. So I read the book to see how she does it.

The book’s cover graphic introduces the reader to Weber’s world: the Brooklyn Bridge—connecting Brooklyn, New York City’s most populous borough, to Manhattan, the third most populous, where she works—is surrounded by several apartment buildings and a Catholic church. The back cover features Weber’s impressive bio. She is an alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has served as the managing

editor for America Magazine, the weekly Jesuit journal, since 2009. She often co-hosts “America This Week,” a weekly radio show on SiriusXM. Weber is also an alumna of the Mercy Volunteer Corps and currently serves as a Mercy Associate of the Sisters of Mercy Mid-Atlantic Community. TwentyThird Publications published Weber’s first book, Keeping the Faith: Prayers for College Students, in 2009, before which she worked for three years as an editor at Catholic Digest magazine.

Weber begins Mercy in the City by mentioning she studied English as an undergraduate. I immediately felt a connection as an English major. Weber’s writing is beautiful, and so many of her lines resonated with me. I felt part of her New York City, and I saw some of myself in her: struggling to do the right thing in a vast, hectic world but not always knowing exactly how to go about it. Although I did not grow up in the Big Apple, I grew up in a small town two hours outside of Chicago and visited the city yearly. My parents are Chicago natives, who grew up a few blocks from each other.

In 2014, I had the opportunity to spend a semester studying at the University of Mary’s Rome campus.

As well, I visited many other major European cities, including Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Buda, Pest (Budapest is actually two cities, which I didn’t know until I arrived) and Krakow. I saw a lot of poverty in Rome, some of which was extremely disturbing, so I could understand Weber’s concern for practicing the corporal works of mercy.

Chapter 1 (“In which I host the Third Annual Sunnyside Pancake Day Spectacular”) opens with Weber throwing a Fat Tuesday party for some friends in her neighborhood in Queens, New York City’s second most populous borough. She shares her Lenten resolutions, which include concretely practicing each of the seven corporal works of mercy. Observant Catholics, like Weber, and more recently Christians of various denominations, choose to give up something or implement something sacrificial in their lives during Lent to prepare for Easter. The corporal works of mercy are: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead and give alms to the poor. The corporal works are accompanied by the seven spiritual works of mercy: instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afflicted, and pray for the living and the dead.

Kerry Weber at lunch at Bareburger restaurant in Astoria, Queens.

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I decided I needed to start paying better attention to this list [the seven corporal works of mercy], not because I was afraid of the end times, but because I was afraid I’d stopped seeing Christ in the people mentioned. City life can do that to you sometimes. When you pass by thousands of people each week, it takes work to see Christ in all of them.

Kerry Weber in Mercy in the City Chapter 2

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Every Christian is obligated to practice both sets, and clearly the corporal and spiritual works intersect and support each other.

Weber does not neglect the spiritual works, as she often prays for the people she encounters, for example. She also attends daily Mass and counsels friends who are becoming Catholic. “At one time or another I’ve done each of these, to some extent,” Weber writes about the corporal works, “but how often and how deliberately?” This struck a chord because it made me examine my charitable acts. No doubt other readers felt the same call to reflection.

I recall donating money and clothing, and smiling at homeless people and saying “Hello.” But how often do I help merely on my own terms when it is convenient?

Weber raises the big question: Is this right, and can we do more?

Two of my favorite chapters were Chapter 9 (“In which I contemplate my early fashion sense and my current clutter”) and Chapter 10 (“In which I realize I don’t need as many clothes as I thought”). Weber shares her attempt to practice the third corporal work, to clothe the naked. She decides to go to the Clothing Room, a center that collects women’s clothing and accessories.

It is designed like a retail store except everything is free, with limits on how many articles an individual can take. Before going, she looks through her belongings and collects about 20 items to donate. Weber is very touched by her experience at the Clothing Room and decides to look through her belongings again. This time, she gathers 59 clothing items to donate.

Before this, Weber says she struggled to part with belongings. “As I begin taking the clothes off hangers and pulling them from bins, throwing them into piles on the floor, I feel lighter,” she remarks afterwards. “Shedding these clothes is not getting rid of my old self, but freeing me to embrace who I am right now.” Here, Weber illustrates why it is important to volunteer to serve those in need. Of course, appropriately thoughtful donations are always welcome. The deeper spiritual question is whether our hearts are moved when we encounter those less fortunate. We give more freely when we perceive and connect with the humanity of others.

Weber’s rummaging through her closet for donations reminded me of an article that popped up on my Facebook newsfeed: “Dear World: Let’s Stop Giving Our Crap to the Poor” by Kristen Welch, which was featured on her popular blog “We are THAT Family.” The article admonishes Christians for giving their leftover stuff to the poor. This seems to be what Weber is getting at when she examines her belongings a second time. As Mother (and soon to be, Saint) Teresa of Calcutta—and my mother, who is my personal icon of generosity—used to say fondly, “Give until it hurts.” This is, of course, uncomfortable to entertain and even more uncomfortable to practice.

Weber’s account inspired me to do a thorough spring cleaning of my closet and donate what I didn’t really need.

Weber approaches the challenge in practicing each work of mercy creatively. For example, Weber feeds the hungry by assisting at a breadline that has been in existence since the 1930s.

This reminded me of my experience volunteering at a food shelter in Bismarck. As the social justice coordinator for University Ministry’s student team, I organize outreach projects, such as partnering with a local food pantry. Once a month, we board a white van (you know the type) and drive downtown to work in the food pantry at Ministry on the Margins, which helps “support men and women who fall through the cracks during transitional times—especially during re-entry into the community from prison,” as the website We need constantly to contemplate states. Ministry on the Margins was founded by the mystery of mercy. It is a wellspring Sister Kathleen Atkinson, who belongs to the same religious order, the Benedictine Sisters of joy, serenity and peace. Our salvation of Annunciation Monastery, that founded and depends on it. Mercy: the word reveals sponsors the University of Mary. Weber notes the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. that some people in breadlines are grateful while Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by others are not, some are talkative while others which God comes to meet us. Mercy: would rather not speak. Some people try to take more than a fair share, and so on. The more I the fundamental law that dwells in the volunteer, the more I realize that serving the poor heart of every person who looks sincerely is not always glamorous—actually, it rarely ever into the eyes of his brothers and sisters is. There is not an epic soundtrack playing in the on the path of life. Mercy: the bridge that background, and some encounters can be really tough to swallow. The more that I am around connects God and man, opening our poverty, the more I realize how broken our hearts to the hope of being loved forever society is. despite our sinfulness.

As I meditate on Weber’s book and my experiences, I realize I want to practice the corporal Pope Francis Misericordiae Vultus, works on a consistent basis. It is easy to resort Bull of Indiction of the to praying only, but the Christian life demands Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy action. Hence, there are spiritual and corporal works of mercy. As a college student, I have limited time, money and belongings, which can squeeze into my 2010 Honda Civic. But I can do and give more, and still fulfill my obligations.

Pope Francis declared 2016 as the Year of Mercy. There is no better time to begin than now. As Weber so poignantly writes, the corporal works of mercy are “works for which none of us is ever quite prepared, but to which all of us are called.” ±

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Movie/TV Review

Fargo: How Far Will You Go? Major themes in Fargo: the movie and TV series Marek R. Dojs Assistant Professor of Communications, University of Mary

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The film “Fargo,” released in 1996, was written and directed

by Joel and Ethan Coen. “Fargo” is considered one of the most important movies of modern American cinema.

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oel and Ethan Coen’s classic film “Fargo” is considered one of the most important movies of modern American Cinema. The film, a neo-noir crime thriller, won 17 major film awards, including two Academy Awards.

In 2006, it was selected for inclusion on the National Film Registry, which was established by Congress to preserve culturally significant films such as “Citizen Kane” and “The Wizard of Oz.” It is also one of my favorite films and so I was extremely dubious when, in 2012, FX Networks announced plans to develop a TV series based on the film.

The first season, called “Fargo” like the film, stars Martin Freeman (who played Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” film trilogy) and Billy Bob Thornton (who was nominated twice for an Academy Award). This “Fargo” received much critical acclaim and won Emmy Awards in 2014 for Outstanding Miniseries, Directing and Cast, as well as Golden Globes in 2015 for Best Miniseries and Best Actor (Thornton) in a Miniseries. The second season won numerous awards, although fewer than the first season.

Why Fargo?

“Fargo” is not a typical crime drama. Staying true to the film, each episode of the TV series begins with a version of this statement: “This is a true story.

The events depicted took place in Minnesota in (year). At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” The stories, however, are not literally true. The “true story” statement is a narrative device inviting the audience to enter into the story at a deeper level.

The TV series features new characters and plotlines, but continues the film’s themes and stylistic elements, such as the trademark Midwestern

accent and the dialogue’s dry, dark wit. This is partly because the series creator and writer Noah Hawley managed to secure Ethan and Joel Coen, who wrote and directed the movie, as executive producers of the TV series, ensuring that the legacy of “Fargo” would be maintained. Looking (metaphorically) through a wide angle lens, every iteration of “Fargo” focuses on the effects of relativism on modern American society and shows characters going to extremes to achieve their goals.

Simply put, “Fargo” asks “How far will you go?”

The film and both TV seasons feature narcissistic antagonists who go to great lengths to satisfy a disordered desire. In the film, we meet Jerry Lundegaard, a car salesman from Minneapolis, whose mysterious money problems take him to Fargo with a convoluted plan involving the kidnapping of his wife to obtain a huge ransom from his wealthy father-in-law.

Although the film doesn’t return to Fargo, the place, the “how far will you go?” theme unfolds in two directions: Jerry and the criminals he hires forge bizarre, bloody paths—as nothing goes as planned—towards their conflicting destinations, while a sheriff, who happens to be seven months pregnant, tenaciously unravels the crimes and tracks the bad guys.

The long-form, episodic storytelling format of the TV series allows for a deeper exegesis on the theme of “how far will you go?” Season One, set in January 2006, features Lester Nygaard, a classic “97-pound weakling” who

Martin Freeman plays Lester Nygaard, a physical and moral weakling, in the first season of the “Fargo” TV series.

[E]very iteration of “Fargo” focuses on the effects of relativism on modern American society and shows characters going to extremes to achieve their goals.

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Kirsten Dunst plays Peggy Bloomquist, an unfulfilled hairdresser, who dreams of “selfactualization,” in the second season of the “Fargo” TV series.

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is the spineless, emasculated facade of a man in Bemidji, Minnesota. He is caught in a dead-end job and a loveless marriage. Lester has no core principles and so is the perfect target for Lorne Malvo, a mysterious drifter whose ability to lie and deceive clearly reminds the viewer of the Devil. Malvo stokes Lester’s discontent and offers him a solution involving an attractively effective (in immediate terms) but false—and ultimately evil—form of masculinity. Without guiding morals, children or other roots, how far will Lester go in his efforts to become what Malvo presents as a real man?

Season Two, set in March 1979, maintains the central theme. There are several plotlines with multiple characters, all going to extremes to satisfy pathologically selfish desires. We meet Peggy Bloomquist (played by Kristen Dunst), a hairdresser who dreams of a life beyond small-town Luverne, Minnesota. Dissatisfied with her future prospects, Peggy plans to attend the “Life Spring Seminar” in order to achieve “self-actualization,” the highest of Maslow’s motivational needs. (Abraham Maslow is not mentioned in the series but he was recognized as the father of humanistic psychology, which was very influential in the late-1970s.) Peggy becomes so focused on this goal that she completely disregards other needs, including her and her husband’s safety and security. As events spin out of control, Peggy is oblivious to the brutal and sometimes ridiculous events happening around her.

How far will Peggy go to achieve self-actualization?

The Long and Winding Road to Normal Significantly, “Fargo” portrays the police, who play the protagonists in the film and TV series, far more positively than most of today’s media. Good filmmakers want their audience to relate to their characters by putting them into their characters’ shoes. The police officers are not hardboiled, cynical caricatures. Instead they and their families are members of small towns who hold deep traditional values and genuinely care for each other and their communities. They are sincere public servants striving to keep the peace, which was easy until the beginning of each season and the movie.

In the second season, Sheriff Larsson (played by Ted Danson) tells his son-in-law, a Vietnam veteran and state trooper, that “after WWII, we went six years without a murder here. Six years. And these days, well, sometimes I wonder if you boys didn’t bring that war home with ya.”

In the previous season, Chief Oswald (played by Bob Odenkirk) says, “I used to have positive opinions about the world, you know, about people.

Used to think the best. Now I’m looking over my shoulder. … The job has got me staring into the fireplace, drinking.”

The central question in “Fargo” repeats for law officers, as best articulated by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” As the

Ted Danson plays Sheriff Larsson, a lawman witnessing his world change for the worse, in the second season of the “Fargo” TV series.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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[The gangster] appeals… to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the ‘normal’ possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes,’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives.

Robert Warshow

police are drawn into the brutality of the plots and counterplots—which become increasingly bizarre into the second season—each officer has to decide how far to go to stop the mayhem without becoming morally indistinguishable from the criminals.

Anchoring the main lawmen and law women is family life. They court.

They go home to husbands and wives, raise their children, eat and watch movies together. This enables them to gaze into the moral abyss of homo criminalis and still maintain their character and humanity.

Ironically, “how far will you go” does end up in Fargo—but the Fargo that actually exists for most residents. The Fargo of family, faith and ordinary, everyday life—if you will go far enough to resist the temptations of the seemingly easy route to wealth and power.

“There’s more to life than a little money, you know,” says Chief Marge Gunderson in one of the movie’s final scenes. “Don’tcha know that?”

From its heavy use of the Midwestern accent to beautiful shots of the frozen Upper Great Plains, and its presentations of greed versus wholesome family life, “Fargo” is clearly an American story. Perhaps “Fargo,” in all its iterations poses the most important question to Americans today: How far will we go to reestablish normalcy in a culture that tolerates moral insanity and even celebrates it?

As Roman law put it: Qui tacet consentire, which Sir Thomas More, a martyred saint, translates in “A Man for All Seasons” as “Silence gives consent.” Most police in “Fargo” do not choose to look away but instead counter wickedness with courage, dedication and virtue.

FX announced in May that Ewan McGregor will be the featured actor for the third season. With the story set in 2010, McGregor will play the two central characters, brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy. Emmit, the elder brother, is a successful business and family man, while Ray lives with his past glories and blames his current misfortunes on his brother. The third season is scheduled for release next spring.

The Revenant: How far did Hugh Glass go?

For years, film critics have been wondering how far would Leonardo DiCaprio have to go to get an Oscar after five previous nominations and no wins? In this case, silence gives assent.

“The Revenant,” by Mexican writer, director and producer Alejandro González Iñárritu, won three Academy Awards this year for Best Director, Best Cinematography and (finally, for DiCaprio) Best Actor. For his portrayal of legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, DiCaprio relied on an intense physical performance and a key use of facial close-ups to communicate great 124 3 6 0

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pain, desperation and determination. In an interview with Grantland, a now-defunct online magazine, Iñárritu said “Honestly, Leo, he’s attacked by a bear, and after that, he becomes almost like a silent character: a lot of things going on, but no words.” Iñárritu also notes, “That’s for me the essence of cinema: not to rely on the words, but images and emotions.” DiCaprio said, in an interview with Yahoo! Movies, “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. … Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set, [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.” In one scene, DiCaprio, a vegetarian, had to eat raw bison, which he quickly threw up once Iñárritu finished the shot.

Going to these extremes as an actor is commendable but seems minor compared to the story of Hugh Glass.

The film is a screen adaptation of the novel by the same title set in 1823 in what is now Montana and South Dakota. “The Revenant” follows the unbelievably true story of Hugh Glass, who battles for survival after being mauled by a grizzly bear and then left for dead—without his knife, gun and flint—by two companions charged with looking after him. One of the companions also killed Glass’ half-native son in order to leave no witness.

Described as the “angriest man in U.S. history” in a 1939 Time magazine review of a non-fiction book that included the story, Glass crawls for most of the 200-mile journey to Fort Kiowa in South Dakota and then tracks (upright) those who left him for dead for hundreds of miles into Wyoming to seek vengeance. In the film, artistic license meshes these two journeys together.

“The Revenant” asks, how far will someone go to survive and then to reap revenge? The answer is two and a half hours of against-all-odds, harrowing adventure—albeit with more grunts and groans than dialogue. The answer is there’s no limit to human will. A man or woman might be stopped or killed by outside forces, but the will can be curtailed only by its owner.

More explicitly in “Fargo,” the question of will is conjoined with moral questions: How far will people go and in which direction? Oddly in “The Revenant,” Hugh Glass succeeds in taking revenge. In the actual account, he tracks down the two men who abandoned him but decides against revenge.

Perhaps “The Revenant” went too far from the true story—and the moral question of revenge—for artistic (and possibly, commercial) gain. ±

“The Revenant,” directed and produced

by Alejandro González Iñárritu, won three Academy Awards in 2015 for Best Director, Best Cinematography and (finally for Leonardo DiCaprio) Best Actor.

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Contributors u Jerry Anderson is the Art Director at the University of Mary. He earned a Bachelor of University Studies from North Dakota State University and a BS in Design from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Anderson has published photos in numerous publications, including the New York Times, US News & World Report and Newsweek. He has also published photos in numerous books, including Every Place with a Name (State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1976) and America 24/7 (Penguin Random House, 2003). u Don J. Briel, PhD, holds the Blessed John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of Mary. Briel earned a BA in History at the University of Notre Dame in 1969, where he studied under the legendary Frank O’Malley. He studied literature at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and earned a Licentiate and Doctorate in Sacred Theology (STD) from the University of Strasbourg, France. In 1981, Briel began teaching at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he founded and, for 20 years, directed the Center for Catholic Studies. This was the first such program in the U.S. and today nearly 100 Catholic Studies programs have been established.

Next to St. Thomas, the University of Mary has the largest such program.

Briel held the Koch Chair of Catholic Studies at St. Thomas and was the first non-clergyman to serve as Chair of the Theology Department. He also founded Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. u Marek R. Dojs is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Mary. Dojs earned a BA in History and Communications from the University of St. Thomas and an MFA 126 3 6 0

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in Radio, Television and Film (focusing on Documentary Production) from the University of North Texas. He is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been screened at national and international venues. In 2008, Dojs won a grant from the Southwest Alternative Media Project’s Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship Program and completed a documentary titled, “Return to Stolowicze,” which was screened at Encuentro Bicultural De Cine Migracion in Mexico City and broadcast on PBS. u Andrea L. Gleiter is a senior at University of Mary completing a BS in English with a minor in Catholic Studies. She is originally from the Northern Illinois, where she worked in public relations for the Diocese of Rockford, and she also taught ballet.

Since her junior year, Gleiter has served as the social justice coordinator for the University of Mary’s student ministry team. After graduating in December 2016, she plans to pursue freelance writing, along with a career in communications or public relations. u Karen Herzog has been a working journalist for more than 30 years, including 20 years as the faith and religion reporter for the Bismarck Tribune. As well as covering religious issues in-depth for two decades, she has written in areas including opinion, legislation, feature stories, breaking news, multipart series, and the social, historical and cultural issues of the Northern Great Plains.

She has served as a newspaper editor and writing coach and continues to be a columnist for the Tribune. She was the recipient of the Mark Kellogg Award from the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain for her work on “New Directions for News.” Herzog’s stories have won numerous awards from the North Dakota Newspaper Association, including for “Beyond

Control,” a news series examining the impact of Missouri River flooding, and for “Living History,” a series of memoirs of North Dakotans who served in World War II. In 2006, Herzog accompanied the veterans on the state’s Roughrider Honor Flight to Washington, DC. Herzog earned a BA in English from the University of Jamestown. Currently, she is the editorin-chief of Momentum Magazine at the University of Mary. u USAF Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Robert H. Latiff, PhD, is an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame and George Mason University. He earned a BS, MS and PhD in Materials Science from the University of Notre Dame.

Latiff served in the military for 32 years. His active-duty assignments included Commander of the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and also Director, Advanced Systems and Technology and Deputy Director for Systems Engineering, National Reconnaissance Office. Since retiring in 2006, Latiff has consulted for the U.S. intelligence community, corporations and universities in technological areas such as data mining and advanced analytics.

He is the recipient of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal and the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. Latiff is currently writing a book about ethical, social and other issues around emerging weapons systems. u Thomas Marple is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Communications at Bismarck State College. Marple earned a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc) from North Dakota State University. Previously, Marple worked as a Conservation Engineering Technician for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. u Kevin Mason is an Instructor of History at Waldorf University. He

earned a BS in Social & Behavioral Sciences from the University of Mary (2011), an MA in History from Wayland Baptist University, and an MA in Organizational Leadership from Waldorf University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Rural, Technological, Agricultural, and Environmental History at Iowa State University. Mason has worked in cultural interpretation for the Fort Abraham Lincoln Foundation, serves on the board of directors for the Winnebago Historical Society, and serves as the appointed chair for the Historic Preservation Commission of Forest City, Iowa. u Patrick J. McCloskey is the Director of Research and Publications at the University of Mary and serves as the editor-in-chief of 360 Review.

He earned a BA in Philosophy and English from Carleton University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. McCloskey has written for many publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and City Journal. He also served as the press secretary for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

In 2009, the University of California (Berkeley) Press published McCloskey’s non-fiction narrative book, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, to enormous critical acclaim. u Mark Mills is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, a Faculty Fellow in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University and CEO of the Digital Power Group.

He writes a tech column for Forbes and co-authored a book titled, The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2006).

Mills has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Times Magazine. Early in Mills’ career, he was an experimental physicist and

development engineer in the fields of microprocessors, fiber optics and missile guidance. Mills was also a partner at a boutique venture fund and co-authored a tech investment newsletter. Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Ronald Reagan. u Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD, serves as the Director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center and is an Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the University of Mary.

Fr. Pacholczyk earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Yale University and did post-doctoral research at Harvard University. He often does media commentaries for major media venues, including CNN International, ABC World News Tonight, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. u Jesse Russell, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mary and co-chairs the campus URead program, the yearly campus-wide book discussion at the University of Mary.

Russell earned a BA in English and Philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville, an MA in Philosophy also from Franciscan, an MA in English in Renaissance Literature from Catholic University of America and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University. u R. Jared Staudt, PhD, is the Catechetical Resource and Training Specialist in the Office of Evangelization and Family Life Ministries at the Archdiocese of Denver. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the Augustine Institute and a lay Benedictine oblate. Staudt earned a BA and an MA in Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas, and a PhD in Systematic Theology from Ave Maria University.

Previously, Staudt served as Director of Religious Education in two parishes and was co-editor of the theological

journal Nova et Vetera. Staudt has written articles in many academic journals, mostly about the relationship of faith and culture, and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He taught at the Augustine Institute for five years before serving as the Director of the Catholic Studies Program and Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies and Theology at the University of Mary. u Sol Stern has been an awardwinning journalist for the past four decades. In the 1960s, he was an editor of Ramparts magazine, the nation’s leading New Left journal. He wrote an expose of the CIA’s penetration and secret subsidies to the National Student Association, which won a George Polk journalism award. For the past two decades Stern has been a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, writing about education reform in the U.S. Stern is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (Encounter Books, 2004) and Common Core: Yeah & Nay (Encounter Broadsides, 2014).

He has also written extensively on the Arab-Israeli conflict and is the author of A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred. u Brenda Werner, PhD, is the Director of the Graduate Education Program at the University of Mary.

She earned a BS in Secondary English Education and K-12 Health/Physical Education from Minot State University, an MS in Teaching from Fort Hays State University, and a PhD in Secondary Education and Administration from the University of North Dakota. After 11 years teaching English at Bismarck High School, Werner was named the 2012 North Dakota Teacher of the Year. In 2014, Werner traveled to China as a member of the National Education Association’s Global Fellowship Program.

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Great Plains Cartoon Caption Contest

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alling all witty readers, writers, writers at heart, and robots. Launch your humor algorithms and create an insightful, wry, ironic or even funny caption for our cartoon. There is no limit on the number of captions you may submit. The best captions will be posted on our website (www.umary. edu/360). Then the winning caption will be published in the next issue of 360 Review with the cartoon. The deadline for all submissions is August 31, 2016.

Submit your entry to: pjmccloskey@umary.edu. Or mail your entry to: 360 Review University of Mary 7500 University Drive Bismarck, ND 58504

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REVIEW

The University of Mary is a private, co-educational Catholic university that welcomes students of all faiths and backgrounds. The university has its origins in the St. Alexius College of Nursing, opened by Benedictine Sisters in 1915.

In 1947, these Sisters established Annunciation Priory in Bismarck, a monastic community independent of the original motherhouse in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

Meanwhile, the nursing college evolved into a two-year women’s junior college, and in 1959, the Sisters founded Mary College as a four-year, degree-granting institution. Full university status was achieved in 1986. The University of Mary has been accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools since 1968, and continues under the sponsorship of the Benedictine Sisters of Annunciation Monastery.

Since its beginning, the University of Mary has sought to respond to the needs of people in this region and beyond. Enrollment grew quickly from 69 students to more than 3,000 students today. The university offers 56 undergraduate majors, 14 master’s degree programs and three doctoral degrees. Classes are conducted at the main campus and other facilities in Bismarck; online; at satellite locations in Arizona, Montana, Kansas, Minnesota and North Dakota; and at campuses in Arequipa, Peru and Rome, Italy.

The University of Mary educates the whole student for a full life, characterized by moral courage and leadership in chosen professions and service to the community. Every aspect of academic and social life is infused with the Benedictine values of community, hospitality, moderation, prayer, respect for persons and service.

Already one of the most affordable, high-quality private universities in the nation, the University of Mary now offers “Year-Round Campus,” a unique college-career option that enables students to earn a bachelor’s degree in just 2.6 years and a master’s degree in four years. This greatly reduces costs and allows students to begin their careers much sooner. The University of Mary offers exceptional educational value, as well as outstanding scholarship and financial aid opportunities. Within six months of graduation, 95 percent of graduates are working or pursuing additional education.

Student athletes at the University of Mary participate in 17 varsity sports in NCAA Division II. Go Marauders!

“For humans, tools point to the necessity of moral inquiry.

Because nature makes only ambiguous prescriptions for us, we are compelled to ask, what is good?

Matthew B. Crawford

Mike Paul uses a hand plane to smooth the edge of a frame for one of his paintings, featured in “Waxing & Waning of Light,” pages 38 to 47.

“360 Review is an exciting new venture that should engender discussion and debate!”

Naomi Schneider, Executive Editor, University of California Press

“360 Review—edited and designed with a sharp eye to the essential reported “360 Review is packed with intelligence detail or arresting chart—provides coastal readers (and anyone else and fine writing. It tackles hotinterested) with important information button issues with intellectual rigor, about the Northern Great Plains, where and illuminates some of the most American virtues and aspirations fascinating stories of the Great continue to thrive.”

Northern Plains.”

Elisabeth Eaves, Editor & Columnist, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Brian C. Anderson, Editor, City Journal (New York City)