Charles Péguy on the Failure of a Culture

The French poet Charles Péguy in 1910 wrote a lengthy essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth) in defense of the actions of the party of Dreyfusards, those who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish descent. Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later exonerated, his case deeply divided the nation along conservative and republican lines, and became a symbol not only for the issue of French antisemiticism, but also for broad political and religious questions, and effected important changes in the official status of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.

Péguy, a Catholic convert and a committed socialist, was also an ardent nationalist, and he wrote Notre Jeunesse to defend the patriotism of his convictions when many saw him as a betrayer of country and of religion. Conservative Catholics on the right were to charge him with disloyalty to the Church, while republicans often held that Catholics could not be true Frenchmen. Yet Péguy also ending up writing an essay that set out his own theory of social and political authenticity.

Péguy held that authentic action for a community arose out of a mystique, a word that can be translated as a faith, a mystery, a tradition, and an operation or action. A mystique is not held by a people consciously, at least not in a way that one debates and studies. It is a more settled way of life and set of convictions that come naturally to a community. The problem is that its mystique could over time become a politique, a political party or theory, an institution imposed from without, a set of values that are debated and proven or disproven but that no longer have a grasp on the community's heart. "Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique," he lamented.

As a Catholic and political progressive, Péguy took the radical step of arguing that "the derepublicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound demystification." Both are a kind of idolatrous and yet sterile modernization that substitutes profound belief and action for cynical theorization and manipulation of an older language.

Péguy goes on to point out that mystiques treat each other in different ways that politiques even when they are in disagreement. The former are far less violent and oppressive, and when they are enemies, the distinction is "at a much deeper, more essential level, and with an infinitely nobler profundity." It is as simple as the distinction between rival virtue and rival malice. Péguy insists, then, that it is a mistake to compare the mystique of one position with the politique of another. The worst sin of all, however, is to pretend to be of a mystique while actually playing the game of the politique: "To steal from the poor is to steal twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice over. To steal the most precious thing of all, belief. Confidence."

A true mystique is marked by ardent loyalty, by love. Only what one is prepared to die for can reveal what one truly believes. "The only strength, the only dignity that exists, is to be loved. . . . Puns will not restore a culture." Péguy's formulation raises a profound and important question for social and political change: how do you know when a people, tradition, culture, or community is truly possessed by a faith rather than theoretical language alone that can be easily adopted without conviction? Moreover, once that mystique is lost, can it be recovered, and it political action useful unless it is?

Augustine's Definition of Peace

Augustine of Hippo in the nineteenth book, thirteenth chapter of City of God explores the need for civic or natural peace even in a society dominated by pagan and temporal purposes. His definition of peace is worth reviewing, which I've broken in up into bullet points for analysis:

• "The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of its parts.
  
• The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites,
  
• and that of the rational soul the harmony of knowledge and action.
  
• The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature.
  
• Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law.
  
• Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord.
  
• Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey.
  
• Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens.
  
• The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God,
  
• and of one another in God.
  
• The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.
  
• Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place. "
  

His set of definitions suggests that order and concord are necessary for many layers and levels of human relations, not only within the self and the human person, but also between families, between polities, and between God and humans ultimately, a peace which arises out of God's own Triune harmony. Only then can all creation be truly at peace. But, Augustine goes onto suggest that Christians have good reasons to promote civil peace within a country even knowing that the non-Christians themselves are cut off from God, are wretched because they are God's enemies:

"And hence, though the miserable, in so far as they are such, do certainly not enjoy peace, but are severed from that tranquility of order in which there is no disturbance, nevertheless, inasmuch as they are deservedly and justly miserable, they are by their very misery connected with order. They are not, indeed, conjoined with the blessed, but they are disjoined from them by the law of order. And though they are disquieted, their circumstances are notwithstanding adjusted to them, and consequently they have some tranquility of order, and therefore some peace. But they are wretched because, although not wholly miserable, they are not in that place where any mixture of misery is impossible. They would, however, be more wretched if they had not that peace which arises from being in harmony with the natural order of things. "

Better to have some order and peace in this world even if it is no lasting version, for it is not up to Christians to increase the wretchedness of their fellow citizens. I think Augustine's point here is the seed of a larger rationale for why Christians should work for shalom and the order of God even in a fallen world that rejects him.

Emmanuel Mounier and Realities of Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier's 1949 volume Personalism represents his mature thought on the ideological and political position by that name that he helped promote in France during the first half of the twentieth century. While Mounier's career as a writer and social critic had been dedicated to a criticism of bourgeois liberal society, the Second World War forced him to recognize the potential for totalitarian abuse in both communist and fascist governments. Unlike his Catholic counterpart Jacques Maritain who came to support something like Wilsonian democracy, Mounier in his remaining few years was more drawn to a socialist vision. Nonetheless, Personalism,as Mounier himself admitted, did not necessarily obligate its adherents to one political platform. Indeed, one wonders that if Mounier had lived, might he have developed a personalist critique of socialism as well?

Mounier begins his slim volume by observing how the Christian notion of the person challenged ancient Greco-Roman notions:

1. Christianity counters the classic distrust of multiplicity with a notion of God's unity working itself out in the diversity of human actions of love.
2. The human being is increasingly understood as "an indissoluble whole" rather than a conglomerate of various elements.
3. God is personal and offers a personal relationship of intimacy and participation to each person.
4. The kingdom of God is not an abstract ideal but a promise of a transformed world and a changed inner heart.
5. God created persons as free creatures to grow and mature.
6. The Incarnation brings together heaven and earth, the mystical and the physical into a complex and affirming unity.

Personalism, Mounier insisted, is not Hegelian idealism, but a recognition of the embodied nature of human beings who in transforming the material, natural world are to "liberate things as well as humanity" (12). Wisdom, in its industry, does not exploit material existence but humanizes the natural world, a world "red in tooth and claw" (to recall Tennyson) which so often seems against us. Thus, we are possessed of a "tragic optimism," even in the face of struggle and effort.

Personalism is also not individualism, which Mounier dismissed as "a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defense" (18). Personalism is instead fueled by the drive to "decentralize" the human self, to give of oneself, donate oneself to others. Without communication comes madness; without giving comes destruction. We become fully persons as we embrace "an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation," as we give ourselves to others in self-bestowal. This also requires a stability of faithful relations with persons across time and space. We can best be faithful to those we remain with long-term.

Mounier had little patience with romanticizing a communal past of small villages, and he upheld not only the notion of human equality but human rights as that which protects and makes human freedom possible. Yet he also stressed the need for people to divest themselves of property and wealth in giving to others, thereby achieving their own personal and spiritual maturity. He imagined this affirmation of love as one requiring struggle both inwardly and outwardly, for the virtue of fortitude was absolutely necessary for personal growth.

Mournier also rejected notions of freedom either as indifference to the physical world or as pure spontaneity of action. Freedom is instead human love working its way out in responsibility. "Our liberties can be no more than opportunities offered to the spirit of freedom" (62). Freedom and personality fulfill themselves in the higher transcendence of a divine purpose: "My freedom itself comes to me as something given: its supreme moments are not those in which I exercise most will-power; they are moments rather of giving-way, or of offering myself to freedom newly encountered or to a value that I love" (66).

Still, Mounier the activist realized that political responses were inevitably compromised. He held that the political and prophetic voices must listen to each other, as well as other kinds of gestures and movements, such as those of industry and contemplation. "Nevertheless, though to 'engage' oneself is to consent to make-shift, to something impure, . . .and to accept one's limitations," he observed; "it does not sanctify one's abdication of personality to any abandonment of the values that it serves. . . . The troubled and sometimes agonized conscience caused by the impurities of our cause should keep us far from fanaticism, in a state of vigilant criticism. . . . The risks we have to run, and the partial obscurity in which we have to take decisions, put us in the state of dispossession, insecurity and hardihood which is the climate of all great action" (92-3).

Mourier held out hope that the slow death of Christendom promised a Christianity "slowly returning to it first position; renouncing government upon earth and outward appearance of sanctification to achieve the unique work of the Church, the community of Christians in Christ, mingles among all men in the secular work,--neither theocracy nor liberalism, but a return to the double rigours of transcendence and incarnation" (122).

God and Majors

Interesting summary of a study on whether one's major in college impacts one's religiosity:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/28/majors

Interview with Francis Collins

To follow-up on Jekabs's last post, here's an interesting recent interview with Collins:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/julaug/evolutionthebibleandthebookofnature.html

Obama's nominee for NIH head an outspoken Evangelical

As one who criticizes President Obama on most issues, I want to make sure I give him credit where it is due. I was impressed that he would nominate an outspoken Evangelical Dr. Francis Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health. Collins, in a recent presentation at UC Berkley presented the following:

• Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”
• Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”
• Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”
• Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”
• Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

I'm not exactly sure what NIH does, and perhaps the nomination is done just to make sure that the Evangelicals are accounted for, but still - I was impressed that Collins would be appointed.

Here is a negative opinion of his nomination from the New York Times.

Christopher Lasch on the Need for a 3rd Way

The late Christopher Lasch is perhaps best known for his classic work of cultural critique The Culture of Narcissism in which he examines how the turn to a therapeutic culture set American society on an inward course that undercuts the basic civic structure necessary for healthy and fulfilling social life. The danger is that of the "Promethean self" that evaluates all of life's goods by its own self-centered calculus. In his sequel, The Minimal Self, Lasch examines how amidst an environment of threat and danger (e.g. escalating crime, terrorism, arms races, etc.) people turn from the Promethean self to a reduced minimal narcissism that seems to combine both self-sufficiency and self-renunciation. Survival and pessimism become the centers of such selves. Both options are fianlly deeply inward and selfish.

Lasch's last important work was The True and Only Heaven, a history of the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its criticism both of the unfettered market system and of the liberal state and the planned economy. In the last few pages of his groundbreaking history, Lasch offers his own opinion that any new populism would learn from the old populism in its critiques but it would have to offer an entirely different vision of wealth and community.

Lasch was something of a pundit, hated by both the Left and the Right, and was even a measured critic of the communitarianism of those like Amitai Etzioni, which he criticized as being concerned with political agendas without being concerned with moral life and personal change. Here's an example of his basic analysis:

"On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their own happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speal for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except that of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church--all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself--schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes--to become a business proposition, to pay its way, to show black print on the bottom line. . . .

"In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust; undermines the willingness both to assume responsiblity for oneself and to hold others accountable for their actions; destroys respect for authority; and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Consider the fate of neighborhoods that serve so effectively, at their best, as intermediaries between family and the larger world. Neighborhoods have been destroyed not only by the market. . . but also by enlightened social engineering. . . .

"Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that, in a democracy, trust can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balance by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole--its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members--than in the responsibility of individuals. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good." ("Communitarianism or Populism? 60-1, 64)

And here's the current system . . .

in an easy to understand flowchart:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/assets_c/2009/07/HealthCareMap.html

Tocqueville on Materialism

To answer one of my own questions from my last post on Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, he condemns excessive materialism (consumerism?) as leading to civic weakness in a people and even to the eventual loss of humanity. He argues that the prosperity that comes with democratic freedoms may eventually undercut them because its people will not longer possess the virtues to use that freedom wisely:

"There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupations and business. If they are required to elect representatives, to support the government by personal service, to meet on public business, they think they have no time, they cannot waste their precious hours in useless engagements; such idle amusements are unsuited to serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of life. These people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the better to look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.

"As the citizens who labor do not care to attend to public affairs, and as the class which might devote its leisure to these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the government is, as it were, unfilled. If at that critical moment some able and ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him. If he attends for some time only to the material prosperity of the country, no more will be demanded of him. . . . A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well-being, awaiting only the hand that will bind it." (474-5)

"Whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which do not concern it. Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it weakens it for all purposes, the chief as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for both. Hence the soul must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. If men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement." (480)

Have we reached this point in the United States?

Flowcharting the proposed health care system

Interesting flowchart put together by Congressman Brady:

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/tx08_brady/71509_hc_chart.html

Death penalty for DUI?

A court in southwest China on Thursday handed down the death penalty to an unlicensed drunk driver who crashed into four sedans, killing four people, in Chengdu late last year, local media reported Friday.

Sun Weiming, a company executive in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, drove his Buick car into four sedans traveling in the opposite direction on December 14. Four people were killed and one was seriously injured in the crash.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/24/content_8469776.htm

Tocqueville on Egoism vs. Individualism

Alexia de Tocqueville in the second book of his justly famous Democracy in America proposed to differentiate simple egoism (or selfishness) from the more seemingly benign motive of individualism. Tocqueville feared that democracy in its positive promotion of individuals and their freedom, as left to itself led to a society that eventually discouraged its people from civic participation and virtuous action:

"Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

"Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. (446-7)

"Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." (448)

Tocqueville's thought here raises some important questions:

1. How does a society that sets its people free to pursue their own ends hold together any notion of the common good?
2. Does democratic individualism naturally lead to a breakdown in community and tradition?
3. How would Tocqueville account for modern consumerism and technologies?
   

Gratitude, Gifts, and Health

Here's a fascinating passage from Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Gifts. I wonder what it might say about current views of healthcare and nationalization?

"[Y]oung people are profoundly unhappy because they have lost a sense of gratitude. They can speak only of rights. Health is a right and sickness a frustration of this right. Healing, so quick now, thanks to our antibiotics, is no longer a gift from God. Happiness is a right. Since no one achieves it, despite all our modern conveniences, everyone is the victim of a frustration complex. No gift can bring joy to the one who has a right to everything. Even love has been devalued; it is but a commonplace convenience which the sexes render one another, without there being any deeper self-commitment. There is no real giving of the self!

"No giving. This word “giving” brings to mind the subtle transition from gift to trade. For it seems to me that it is in this profound human need to give that we need to give that we need to seek for the desire for trade, commerce, and even for farming and industry. For these “offer” men the goods which they need. That the pleasure of giving is reciprocal, that it is organized into exchange systems, that the invention of money has generalized it on a world-wide level has in no way changed its physiological meaning. The best businessmen, those who illustrate most truly the business mind, are men who like to give, who like to please the customer. They always feel as if they were bestowing a gift with their merchandise, adding again a kind word and a beautiful smile. They also feel that they are recipients of a gift when people pay them.

"Effective advertising has its roots in just such an attitude of mind. Because these men are themselves convinced that they are offering what the client needs, they are able to persuade him that it is so. . . . Is it not interesting to look upon the whole of economic life from this point of view? Not just as an instinctual need to procure for oneself the means of subsistence, but equally as a universal, spiritual need for exchanging with others: In other words, to see it as the need for interpersonal contact." (31-33)

True Community & Health Care

The following is from the essay "The Work of Local Culture" by Wendell Berry. While Berry is discussing the general failure of community life and place in the United States, his insights on trust, story, local place, and doctors, I think have ramifications for how we should think about the prospect of a national health care system in this country. First, Berry:

"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another, and this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

"We don’t trust our “public servants” because we know that they don’t’ respect us. They don’t respect us, as we understand, because they don’t know us; they don’t know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them and to us. Doctors who are in a country community must send their patients to specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not infallible and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great expense to us. . . .

"Several decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and provisional. All this money is lost to us by the failure of community. A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside-unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influences of salesmen." (157-158)

"The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and loving used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly."(166)

(From the 1990 collection What Are People For?)

Berry argues that local culture is dependent upon relationships of face-to-face trust and mutual life and involvement in the day-to-day business of work and worship and play. Without that trust, we have a culture of personal protectionism and tort that renders our healthcare fraught with impersonality and consumerism. While Berry does not suggest this directly, I think his chief insight is that healthcare should not be commodified to begin with. Medicine does involve money, but when we make medicine and health a matter of market relations we have already started down the road to a broken system, one lacking personhood and genuine compassion; that is, one that is is neither healthy nor caring.

Of course, I am not denying that doctors should have a reasonable livelihood, as should medical researchers and educators. (Though, pharmaceutical reps are another matter entirely. . . ). Nonetheless, we currently have a system where much of our health and sickness is turned over to people we do not know and that we must trust despite our lack of any true knowledge of who they are or what their characters are like. And because we have commodified medicine and medical care, the natural and unnatural inequities in wealth have given rise to a state where strangers decide whether our sickness is worth giving much or any attention to, and where expensive procedures may easily devastate poor and working families in short order. We decontextualize health by making it a matter of management and numbers, rather than persons, their stories, and our relations with them in our communities.

A national system, which hopes to fix these problems, may or may not help curb the current excesses, but I doubt whether it can finally heal them. It participates in the anonymity and dangerous policy-decisions of technocrats who believe they know best what others need, though in all honesty, these are just numbers on a ledger to be balanced. Any system that robs us of our personhood and reduces us to an aggregate of material individuals is already shoddy in its workmanship from the get go.

If you demand of me money for numbers on a ledger to serve those I do not know, then understandably, it might feel like robbery, but if you speak to me of helping Toby and his premature twin daughters or David's cherished aging father or my own brother with mental retardation, then health and care become meaningful again, matters involving people whom we love.

Theological Reflections on Moving

A very interesting set of personal and theological reflections by Gilbert Meilaender on changing homes and cities after 18 years: "Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving."

Here's one typical paragraph:

"I now realize that I had forgotten one little matter-what we call the doctrine of creation. Wholly apart even from any work-related questions, over eighteen years one carves out a life in a place. Except in the most extreme of circumstances, I suspect that it doesn't even particularly matter whether that place is generally perceived as desirable. It becomes home, the place where one is located. One walks certain routes, enjoys certain trees, recognizes certain people. We have doctors and dentists, grocery stores and shopping malls, baseball fields and banks, churches and schools. All become deeply embedded in a pattern of life. As Dr. Johnson is supposed to have claimed to refute Berkeley's idealism by kicking a stone which turned out to have its matter quite securely in place, so moving after eighteen years is a refutation of any supposition that our self is not in good part a body located in space and time."

But, really, the whole piece is worth pondering.

Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

Jacques Maritain, the important neo-Scholastic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, also contributed to the conversation on Christian Personalism. His most important book on the subject was his 1946 The Person and the Common Good. In this work, Maritain distinguishes individuality and personality:

"As an individual, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of the universe, a unique point in the immense web of cosmic, ethnical, historical forces and influences-and bound by their laws. Each of us is subject to the determinism of the physical world. Nonetheless, each of us is also a person and, as such, is not controlled by the stars. Our whole being subsists in virtue of the subsistence of the spiritual soul which is in us a principle of creative unity, independence and liberty" (38).

Maritian is invoking and answering the Kantian distinction between the physical and moral universes. For Maritain it is important that we recognize that we are both material and spiritual:

1. We are each individual. We exist separately in a material manner from other material organisms and objects. We each occupy distinct places in space. Our material existence receives a particular form-a particular shape and identity which is an expression of a more general type. We are each members of and particular examples of a species. Our bodily lives are grounded in our senses and desires.
   
2. Yet we are also persons. We have particular personalities. "Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite" (41), and because of this, persons communicate with other persons; they commune with them to a greater or lesser degree. Persons are oriented to each other by love and faithfulness, by recognizing the innate dignity in another who is made in the image of God.
   

For Maritain, our orientation to one of these has all to do with what we become. If we are dominated by our material selves, our higher personalities become debased and wanton. If we are dominated by our spiritual call and direction, our selves take on admirable and truly human expansiveness:

"If the development occurs in the direction of material individuality, it will be oriented towards the detestable ego whose law is to grasp or absorb for itself. At the same time personality, as such, will tend to be adulterated and to dissolve. But if the development occurs in the direction of spiritual personality, man will be oriented towards the generous self of the heroes and saints. Thus, man will be truly a person only so far as the life of the spirit and of liberty reigns over that of the senses and passions" (44-5).

Thus, true personhood points to the shape of the political society. Human beings are innately political because they are innately social. Will our common polis then be a society of individuals each tearing at the other in demands and negotiations, or will our common life be orientated to a common good? "The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole" (49). Maritain is quick to stress that if we misunderstand the common good to be a collective goal other than the good of each person, we end with a totalitarian collective. If however, there is no common good, we end with radical individualism and no higher vision of human life.

The common good should be the development of the good life, the life of virtue, friendship, happiness, family, and so on. When this is the case, then the common good flows back to the benefit of each member, helping him or her to develop true liberty and freedom. But even this will eventually go wrong if it is not oriented to the greater end of the love of God and the beatific vision: "The common good of the city or the civilization . . . does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it, unless it is subordinated, not as a pure means, but as an infravalent end, to the order of eternal goods and the supra-temporal values from which human life is suspended" (62).

Any good political society will consider that the goods it imparts to its persons will ultimately recognize that as persons they are oriented to the eternal: "the common good by its essence must favor their progress toward the absolute goods which transcend politcal society" (76). Persons are created to serve their communities, but communities/societies that treat persons as material individuals will enslave most of them for the profit of a few. The Church is thus a society that models for other political societies God's best. Maritian sums it up this way:

"If we consider this grand City as living in its entirety upon the common good which is the very life of God, communicated to the multitude of the just and seeking out the errant, then each stone is for the city. But if we consider each stone as living itself, in its personal participation in this common good, upon the very life of God that is communicated, or as sought after personally by God, who wills to communicate His own life to it, then, it it toward each one that all the goods of the city converge to receive of their plenitude. In this sense, the city is for each stone" (86-7).

John MacMurray & the Personal Structure of Freedom

"Until we recover our sense of proportion, until we recognize our creaturliness and our dependence, we shall continue to frustrate our freedom by desiring what cannot attain, and by using our resources for our own destruction. Humility is the handmaid of freedom. It is the meek who inherit the earth."--John MacMurray

Moral philosopher John MacMurray was particularly concerned with how the intersubjective nature of personhood shaped the conditions of freedom. For MacMurray, the personal and the community are tied together. The personal does not exist without the life of the community. How can this be the case?

1. MacMurray starts by stressing the action of a person. A person intends to act in a certain way; this requires a motive. Persons have free will which allow them to choose to act for certain reasons before they act.
2. But free will defined this way is only the beginning of freedom. The conditions of true freedom are achievable only by having a moral end which governs our techniques. Thus, we absolutely need self-control, and one is not truly free without it.
3. Action is inevitably interaction. MacMurray insisted that the arena of human action is for the most part that of persons-in-relation not that of individuals as a simple aggregate. Persons are still individuals but they are are truly persons only in their nexus of relations.
4. The highest relationships are that of persons in interaction together exhibiting true love, not that of unequal master-slave relations based on fear and desire for power. Persons cannot be reduced to relations of power.
5. "Community," for MacMurray is closer to friendship than society. True freedom is found in community, not society.
   
6. "Society," as he defines the term, is an impersonal interaction of persons based on mutual cooperation but motivated by fear and a concern with a justice of the distribution of goods, duties, and burdens.
7. "Community," on the other hand, has a common life based around a common purpose. Its end is itself. It pursues the living of its friendship. It is motivated by love, not self-interest and fear, and according to MacMurray is always universal in its potential scope--all are invited.
8. The common purpose and end that creates this community is genuine religion. God as the Wholly Personal Other is the ground of a community's love and friendship. Religion both creates and celebrates community. It is what gives rise to the tradition that offers some continuity of the community over space and time.
   
9. Without true community, society-whatever its democratic claims--can only offer a limited freedom of negotiation and fear. Society's justice is a thin project of mediating competing claims.

"Friendship reveals the positive nature of freedom. It provides the only conditions which release the whole of the self into activity and so enable a man to be himself totally, without constraint. It is in this sense, in particular, that freedom is a constitutive principle of friendship. "

Gabriel Marcel & The Promise of Fidelity to Persons

The Christian "existentialist" philosopher Gabriel Marcel also had an important role in Christian Personalism. In particular, he brought together ethical, emotional, and existential commitments to show their dependence upon each other. (I should say in passing that reading Marcel's existential diary, Being and Having, was an important help to me at a time in which my faith was foundering and I was cut off from trust of God or others.) Here's some of his key ideas:

1. Ours is a broken world characterized by the impersonal relations of technology. The world system is functionalist in its treatment of situations and people. This treatment creates a condition of despair since technology and functionalism can not solve or engage the personal.
2. As persons created in the image of God we are created for ontological wholeness. It is a condition of who we are and of the trajectory of our lives in time and space. To be human is to pursue wholeness.
3. One way we learn to achieve wholeness is to distinguish between what we "have" and what we "are." Both are important ways to relating to reality, but to confuse the two is to distort essential aspects of our selves as things that are disposable.
4. Not all of life is a problem to be solved; much of it is a mystery to be received and lived. Again, to confuse the two is to invite frustration and despair. To treat people as problems is to attempt and reduce them to things that can be manipulated rather than other images of God that we encounter in all their value and difference.
5. Intersubjective experience involves the risk of making oneself disponibilite, that is available, disposable, at hand for another. It involves making oneself a gift to another, offering one's self to another because we are "with" the other; we are part of them.
6. The fullest relationships are ones of mutual reciprocity. They are acts of charity and presence. They require of us fidelity--commitments to be at the disposal of another--and this needs our constant willingness to remain open and accountable to other persons.
7. The power to do this is found in the Christian virtue of hope, which is given actively by God to the human person.

"The possibility of despair is bound up with liberty. It is the essence of liberty that it is able to be exerted in self-betrayal. Nothing which is outside [us] can shut the door to despair. . . . Fidelity [should be] considered as the recognition of something permanent . . . [and] witness considered as the beginning of things--the Church a perpetutated witness, an act of fidelity. It is an essential characteristic of the being to whom I give fidelity to be not only liable to be betrayed, but also in some manner affected by my betrayal.

"Fidelity [then is] regarded as witness perpetuated, but it is the essence of witness that it can be obliterated and wiped out. . . . Fidelity can only be shown towards a person, never at all to a notion or an ideal. An absolute fidelity involves an absolute person. Question: does not an absolute fidelity to a creature presuppose Him in whose sight I bind myself?"

Paul Tournier & the Meaning of Persons

The psychologist Paul Tournier was another important contributor to Christian Personalism. Especially important to his work as a therapist and a medical doctor was the stress on treating patients as persons with full dignity and not as simple cases to be solved. His thinking was clearly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who distinguished between I-Thou relationships and I-It relationships.

Tournier defined persons as those characterized by both a separation from others and a connection to others: "the double movement" of "a separation followed by a relation. By the secret the person is formed, and then by communication of the secret is affirmed." In other words, we each have things that are ours particularly yet they are also communicated in acts of trust to others. In doing so, we open ourselves as more than atoms in relations of defense and negotiation. We risk our inner beings with others.

This leads to another aspect of personhood, that of commitment and responsibility. "The personage," according to Tournier is "an external appearance which touches the personage of others from outside," while "the person communicates inwardly with the second person, the 'thou'." In Tournier's thinking, this inward offering is essential to our growth and development as moral and aesthetic beings. He sees this as important in marriage and in healthcare:

"The true dialogue [in marriage] is not the first easy communion, wonderful though it be--the impression one has of sharing the same feelings, saying the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The true dialogue is inevitably the confrontation of two personalities, differing in their past, their upbringing, their view of life, their prejudices, their idiosyncrasies and failings--and in any case with two distinct psychologies, a man's and a woman's. . . . Marriage thus becomes a great school of the person, through the level of personal commitment it entails and the exacting quality of the dialogue that demands it."

"For me as a doctor to become a person, to attain completeness as a human being, the road is the same as for my patients, and I must commit myself to it before I can hope to lead them along it. It is the road of personal dialogue with God and with my fellows. There is a decisive turning I must take, that leads me into the word of persons . . .It is this aptitude for personal contact, which is created and nourished by being sincerely sought after, which is the proper medicine of the person. . . . There comes into being a 'reciprocity of consciousness,' to use M. Nedoncelle's admirable expression. I allow my person to be discovered and known, and at the same time discover and know the person of my patient. It is in this that the medicine of the person demands a personal commitment which is not called for by technical medicine."

Personhood vs. Individualism

One of the more interesting aspects of Christian Personalism was its insistence on the distinction between individualism, by which most understood the classic liberal vision of society as that of a contractual negotiation among separate selves, and personhood, by which they meant a Judeo-Christian vision of persons who are interdependent and spiritual in their interactions and identities. Here's an example of this way of defining the terms from Emmanuel Mounier:

The fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation. It lies not in separation but in communication. . . . Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defence. This was the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected, turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoisms should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association--such is the rule of civilization now breaking up before our eyes, one of the poorest history has known. It is the very antithesis of personalism, and its dearest enemy.

Christian Personalism

In the mid-twentieth century, a loose movement called Christian personalism arose in response to what it perceived as the extremes of totalitarian collectivism and atomizing individualism. Participants in the movement, Protestant and Catholic, argued that the human person must be understood as a relational and communal being, that one's personal fulfillment came from participating in relational social structures, that one's personality and growth were based in interacting with others in a healthy and holy way for the common good, and that ultimately community has its person-centered basis in Christ the Logos of the Universe. While personalist thinkers did not share a common political vision, they did hold that personalism had political and economic implications. Namely, to conceive of the body economic as only the market exchanges of otherwise isolated individuals was to ignore the material and cultural soil of our personhood. Likewise, to see individual persons as products of material, historical forces and thereby, subject to the all-powerful collective was to rob each one of his or her freedom expressed in community.

Individualism without some sense of how our persons are designed by God to be complementary cuts us off from the fruits of interpersonal aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical development. Collectivism without recognizing our personal free will and diverse identities robs us of the same.

Here's some brief passages from this school of thought that I think are worth pondering:

"Collectivism is no solution to the problem of modern individualism. Individualism and collectivism are two antithetical extremes which have in common only that they both leave the individual on his own. They both miss the essence of the human person who finds happiness and peace only in personal union, in common values and goals, in mutual giving and the sharing of personal values"--Walter Kasper

"[There is] an interdependence and reciprocity between the person and society: all that is accomplished in favor of the person is also a service rendered to society, and all that is done in favor of society redounds to the benefit of the person" --John Paul II

"Theological development and wholeness are found in community, not in isolation. Theological research in the spirit of communio is a search for the common truths and insights that bind me to others in Christ. The solitary thinker who follows no guidelines but his own mind, thinks himself into further isolation and loneliness. The thinker who is attuned to the Mind of Christ in the Church, is never alone. He is in communion with Christ and with the whole community of Christ's faithful who have lived in fellowship, and thought and believed in it, since apostolic times"--Cormac Burke

"Personality tends by nature to communion. . . . For the person requires membership in a society in virtue both of its dignity and its needs. . . . The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is a mirror of the whole. The end of society, therefore, is neither the individual good nor the collection of the individual goods of each of the persons who constitute it. . . . The common good of the city is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the proper good of a whole. . . It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts into which it flows back and which, in turn, must benefit from it." --Jacques Maritian

"It is the sharing of a common life which constitutes individual personality. We become persons in community, in virtue of our relations to others. Human life is inherently a common life. Our ability to form individual purposes is itself a function of this common life. We do indeed enter into specific relations with our fellows in virtue of specific purposes of our own; and we must do so in order to realize, in concrete experience, the common humanity which makes us persons. . . . Community is prior to society."--John MacMurray

My healthcare is not a community decision

My health care is not a community decision.

To say that health-care is a community decision is to say that one person should pay for the choices of other. No, not should pay, but must pay for others' choices.

It would be entirely consistent with the Christian message to say that individuals should voluntarily chose to help those in need, but it is entirely inconsistent with the Christian message to say that people in the community MUST be forced to help those in need. This is an important distinction that seems to get ignored a good part of the time.

So - health care is not a community decision, health care is an individual decision.

• Individuals must make their own choices about their lifestyle, and suffer or enjoy the consequences.
• Individuals must make their own choices about their diets, exercise, etc. and refrain from forcing others to pay for their decisions.
• Individuals - and this is where Christ showed us a great example - must make their own voluntary choices about when to help those in need, and how much of their own resources to give to those in need (because of bad luck or bad decisions). What a great place for Christians to take the lead!

My health care is not a community decision.

Physician's Oaths

Honor physicians for their services,
for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and they are rewarded by the king.
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth,
and the sensible will not despise them.
..........................................................
. . . give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
do not let him leave you, for you need him.
There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too pray to the Lord
that he will grant them success in diagnosis
and in healing, for the sake of preserving life.
He who sins against his Maker
will be defiant towards the physician.
--Sirach 38: 1-3, 12-15
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Charles S. Yanofsky has complied a series of physician's oaths. What's interesting is how they each ground their medical ethical commitments in differing metaphysical ways. His own reflections at the bottom of the page are worth reflecting on and disagreeing with in some cases. To me, a fundamental discussion of health care should begin with what its purpose and role is under God in relation to human beings:

1. How does the Trinitarian nature of our faith shape our view of the community's role in health care?
2. How does the ecclesial shape of our Christian experience speak to health care?
3. How does our understanding of human beings as the imago dei guide our views on health care as a service and potentially as a gift?
4. How does a Christian view of economy, ecology, culture, and market shape our treatment of the social and ethical realities of modern health care?
   

Why We Must Ration Health Care

"A utilitarian philosopher’s argument for placing a dollar value on human life"

Addendum to the Two Cultures

Cynthia Ozick in her essay "Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters" argued that C.P. Snow and F. R. Leavis were in the long-run both wrong. Snow at the time was already wrong, and should have known(probably did know) better: "[W]e had already had well over a hundred years to get used to the idea of science as a multi-divergent venture--dozens and dozens of disciplines, each one nearly a separate nation with its own goverance, psychology, entelechy." Yet, Ozick, insisted that natural science nonetheless had a kind of polythiesm or animism that held its disparate parts together.

Leavis, on the other hand, at the time was right--there really was one culture of the humanities--the belles-lettres--that held it together. But this is now lost, she laments. Instead, "the culture of the humanities has split and split and split again, always for reasons of partisan ascendancy and scorn." Novelists, poets, journalists, and critics are divided from each other in their sour professionalism. Furthermore, there is no longer a unifying theory or philosophy that offers a center around which to gather even in good-hearted debate.

Is she right? Have we come to a vast broken mirror of a thousand cultures without a frame?

Is the Economic Crisis a Sin for Society

Article Subtitle: "Why America needs a new Social Gospel"

This is an interesting article by Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

As goes Calfornia... ?

How long before the US does this?

This is from MyMoneyBlog.

Faith, Economics, and Ecology Article

"As the world heats up and economic dislocation ravages the poor, religious leaders offer up their diagnoses and prescriptions"

Three Cultures?

H. Newton Malony insists that there are three intellectual cultures in American society:

1. science, which strives "the general conditions that regulate the physical and social world through replicable experiments, sensate experience, and logical reasoning;"
2. the humanities, which strive to explicate cultural matters in history, philosophy, anthropology, and the arts;
3. religion, which "attempts to deal with ultimate struggles . . . in facing the enigmatic, the tragic, and the mysterious."

Malony's trifurcation shows not only the distinctions that C.P. Snow, like so many others came to assume, but also indulges in the problematic nature of "religion" as a general identifiable category of human experience, and one that is existentially removed form the other two. SHould we really see religion as a "culture"?

Fairness in grading

What would constitute fairness in grading? Would it be fair to give some students a higher grade than to others? Perhaps we should give all students the same average class grade on each assignment?

The following is taken from a recent email I received. The experiment probably never actually happened.

An economics class in a local college was insisting that fairness demands that the same be given to each. The professor in this economics class then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on this 'fairness in grading' plan".
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D!
No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that this type of 'fairness' in policy would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Anyone want to try this in your classes this Fall? :)

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow--Part 4

So Snow held science to offer a this-worldly salvation, while Leavis in turn held to the humanities as the promise of salvation for the individual through culture. Is it possible for our students to partake of culture in a different way? Consider the following two areas of literary value: the nature of multicultural literature and the need for ecumenism in matters of taste. As to the first, I trust we are long past the canon wars of the 80's and 90's; however, one aspect of that later debate remains; namely, the question as to whether education in general, and the humanities in particular, function to free us from oppressive collectives or whether they must free us by acknowledging those communities of origin as essential to identity. Both, as we shall see, have their limitations. Charles Taylor in his famous essay, "The Politics of Recognition" notes that the politics of equal identity and dignity assume "universal human potential," as well as a concern with survival of the self. But increasingly this potential includes a politics of the equal recognition of one's identity group and of its survival. Survival policies seek to nurture--his word is "create"--continuing members (58).

Educational policies (such as canonical inclusion) work to protect collective identity from national structures that work against their continued importance. The difference-blind society, it can be charged, is actually highly discriminatory in its imposition of one kind of culture (43). Taylor notes, "The very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal '" (44). We must face that even standards of worth are not transcultural (67). Taylor points out that by prejudging equal worth we already act on our Western standards as presupposing the correct ones. Ironically, our predisposition to finding all cultures of positive value actually flattens the actual horizons of encounter across cultures:

The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically -perhaps one should say tragically- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the other into our categories. For instance, we will think if their "artists" as creating "works," which we then can include in our canon. By implicitly invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures, the politics of difference can end up making everyone the same. (71)

I would contend that something like this happens in Arnold and Norton's treatment of culture as the religion of cultivation. Even if we bracket out the particular aspects of their life and thought that were highly prejudicial to non-Western societies, what remains is still a set of claims as to what constitutes cultivation and culture. They cannot step outside a particular judgment to what culture is, both in its pedagogical and purported descriptive summations. This phenomenon can be seen in the Snow-Leavis debate. Culture is judged by both authors in differing ways as salvific in that it imparts existential meaning (and or creature comfort) to help shore us up against a world "red in tooth and claw." One strand of history behind the discourse of salvation in Leavis and Snow is the creation of culture as a substitute for piety and the specialization of education into disciplines that undergirded, one could contend even helped create, science's disciplinary existence. They formed a subculture offering material salvation, of "more jam" as Leavis derided it. To judge faith as but one expression of the larger mythos of Kultur, indeed, perhaps even to accept "religion" as an ultimate sociological category, is to render it one humanism in the matrix of many.

As John Millbank has famously said, "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. . . . once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God" (1). Either Kultur as anthropological culture or as incarnational history will function as the parameters for the others' meaning. Culture as a category of value already carries with it assumptions about the nature of humans, their purpose, happiness, morality, and so forth. Literary study defined as the study of cultural texts is not a neutral practice that is transferable from one social end to another.

This raises then the second issue: that of the possibility of an ecumenical view of beauty and art. If we do accept Christian faith as the point of functional discourse and not as an expression of Leavis, Trilling, and Norton's cultural salvation, can one avoid the trap Taylor has outlined above? Can a theological reading of a work of literature avoid flattening the work into a two-dimensional purpose? Can we remain open to the Other? Or as, Trilling admits in a sober moment, can we "no more escape from the cultural mode than we can escape from culture itself" (175).

Frank Burch Brown in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste has suggested that such an openness is indeed possible, though "even ecumenical and inclusive Christian taste must also be in some ways discriminating" (25). Art objects, Brown contends, do not entirely self-generate their own values. Religious texts, for example, are informed by theological readings and practices. More specifically, for our purposes, Christian taste has to be shaped by the virtues of generosity and of charity, of gratitude and being easily taught (193). Such taste begins with a set of community practices, humbles itself in learning a differing set of practices, and eventually reaches a point where the text in question may transcend those cultures of taste in unpredictable ways. Indeed, following Taylor, to attempt to predict how would be to already close down part of what can be learned. Such pedagogy does not preclude our own soteriology. Brown notes, "life typically finds various and surprising ways of turning religious" (251). However, Christian taste must be informed by the enculturation of certain capacities with certain ends in mind. Not any old culture will do. In his reflections on culture, T. S. Eliot warns that at the heart of both individualism and collectivism there is the temptation to idolatry, as well as demonization of opponents:

But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity- and most of all perhaps humility- can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain. (75)

And thus, literary culture and teaching of a Christian sort must have as its end a purpose other than simply freeing the individual from a parochial ghetto of the mind, more than empowering the individual by recognizing his or her cultural worth, or more than creating a socially useful literature that honors material matters of economic justice and of scientific invention. Each of these may have their place within a larger practice, but that caritas of taste must be cultivated with the end of loving God and neighbor.

As André Maurois has said, "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 3

The Humanities as Salvific Culture

From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.

Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).

This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).

And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:

1. the nurture aesthetic sensibilities through literary and artistic works;
2. the professorial linkages across cultural eras and times;
3. and the praise of European civilization as a kind of supercultural whole, though in all fairness Norton did not see Europe as the sole bearer of "civilization" (102-103).

Culture, however understood, became encoded with secular soteriological claims. Its purpose was to provide a comprehensive set of values, meanwhile leaving the physical condition of life to the natural (and eventually social) sciences.

As Turner points out, Norton substituted the vertical connection of humanity to God with a horizontal one of people to people (380). For Norton, the intuition of beauty was a product of human cultural progress. He understood beauty to be tied to moral desires, so that to cultivate one was to nurture the other. Imagination was at the heart of perceiving beauty; he saw this as an intellectual faculty obtained through "reflection, comparison, and remininscence" of images and other sense impressions (Liberal Education 382). In this sense, Norton's project represented the transition between other common sense realist claims for the moral sympathies and the eventually move to moral pragmatism. Turner claims that "Norton invented Western civilization" (384) in the sense that he put together a pedagogical and ideological program out of what others were suggesting piecemeal (384).

Yet at the project's heart were the conditions for its demise. Philology as the study, reconstruction, and interpretation of ancient texts formed the backbone of 18th and 19th century German university research and formed the basis for Norton's project. Philology was guided by cultural context and historicism (Roberts and Turner 97ff.); the first demanded a sense of the ancient culture's differences, while the second taught the constant change and evolution of cultures over time. In the end philological historicism within the humanities worked against anything like holism and eventually opened the way for a non-Christian soteriology to take its seat at the heart of university education, dismissing a unified or normative knowledge. It created a religion of cultivation, but one increasingly subject to emotivist ethics and relativistic truth claims.

By positioning ultimate meaning within the social and artistic milieu alone, it opened the door for William James' judgment of religion as capacity of supernatural feeling, but one without any final truth claims. For James, "Christianity makes sense only as disguised humanism" (Hauerwas 64). Prayer is only subjective authenticity and theological claims are only "over-beliefs" arising from religious feeling (66-68). There can be no final adjudication of what is true. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch would come to label this phenomena the "crisis of historicism" (119), one in which human culture could make only an agnostic gesture to the possibility of something beyond.

And this is what is at the heart of the Snow-Leavis debate. The two were, ironically, more in agreement than one might first think: both see the individual as primary and the conditions of life as finally oppressive and needing to be mitigated. Both also put something like an implicit trust in the humanities as offering the individual some surfeit from societal and biological meaninglessness. For Snow, however, only science can offer physical prosperity, which must be approached collectively while for Leavis and Trilling, the "criticism of life" offers a chance for freedom from the technopoly's oppression and operative conformity. Yet neither can reach a common basis for their pedagogical platforms. It is also highly questionable whether Trilling's attempt to adjudicate the two is any more successful.

Compare their assumptions with contemporary definitions of culture that Trilling recommended to his fellow Liberals in the 1940 Parisian Review, not for their "allegiance" but for their serious "consideration" (22). Historian Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot, whom Dawson influenced as part of The Moot and The Sword of the Spirit intellectual and ecumenical circles, held that culture and religion could not separated; indeed, a culture's without a religion was in the process of dying. Dawson held, "We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life" (Historic Reality 68). Religion, even if observed sociologically, is not one more sociological section of culture; it is not a sign system giving ritual meaning to otherwise material and psychological insufficiencies. Dawson charged that the material reading of history is not wrong to judge some "spiritual aspects of culture as conditioned by its material elements, but in the assertion of an absolute casual dependence of the former on the latter" (Enquiries vii). For Eliot, a people's religion and their culture are intertwined, perhaps really two aspects of the same thing, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people" (101). Culture is "a whole way of life" (103) and a "lived religion" (104). But no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. Europe, thinks Eliot, has always been more or less Christian but not totally so. By incarnation, the, he means neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification (105ff.). Instead, he sees the two as operating in something like a tandem:

An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. (200)

As we move into what many see as a post-Christian Europe, the jury remains out as to whether Eliot is correct.

What Trilling found attractive in Eliot's position was the promise of something beyond dialectical materialism of the Left: "What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth" (29-30). Trilling found in Eliot's politics the hope of a humanity not reducible to the Soviet overman nor the capitalist consumer. He approved in Eliot that "politics is to be judged by what it does for moral perfection, rather than the physical easement of man" (27). Trilling longed for something like a spiritual component to the human culture, even if was unable to conclude that "supernaturalism can aid us" (32).

Even if one finds aspects of Dawson and Eliot's historiography wanting, nonetheless, their insights leave those of us who teach literature in a confessional setting with a particular dilemma that I can only sketch in outline here: Can Trilling and Leavis' answer to Snow be our own? In light of the soteriological substitution each is making, should we be seeking to liberate our students from their cultural parameters? Likewise, what is the relationship between the cultures we study and the faith culture we consciously or unconsciously cultivate in our students' educations?

Are We Really Paying You for This?

I like sports. College football is one of my favorite things. Most college football fans suffer constant frustration regarding the inability of the college football power brokers to develop a playoff system. I know it frustrates me.

However, I personally do not believe this issue possesses enough significance for Congress to call two hearings! So, Joe Barton and Orrin Hatch cannot find enough to do with the economy, Iraq, Iran and Honduras on the table? Really!!

Here are some of my thoughts. First, stop wasting your time and my tax dollars grand standing!! Second, this article ably lays out why Congress does not have the ability to enact meaningful reform. So, why hold hearings unless you need yet another opportunity to look tough with your fake bravado and anger!

Finally, the BCS is a prime example of the haves getting their way while the have-nots get in line with the hope of securing a top tier bowl. In a battle of the haves vs. the have-nots, which side do politicians generally take?

The Fog of War

One of the more famous and controversial figures of the 20Th century passed away recently. I am referring of course to Robert Strange McNamara. You were thinking of someone else?

McNamara was famous because he was appointed president of Ford Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration before his 45Th birthday. In fact, he was the first Ford president outside of the Ford family.

McNamara possessed a rigid and rational mind honed by statistical analysis. His belief in rational policy analysis transformed both the Ford Motor Company and America's military structure.

However, rational analysis does not work for every issue or challenge. War serves as a prime example. McNamara believed he could manage war like he managed an assembly line or a budget. He was wrong and the Vietnam War serves as a constant reminder.

Additionally, another issue with McNamara was his relationship with the truth. He has a way of remembering decisions that absolved him of failure and criticism.

Interesting person. Interesting life.

Family of nations "with real teeth"

A misguided and dangerous statement from the newest Papal Encyclical Caritas In Veritate.

"In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth."

What? We need an even more centralized authority with even stronger teeth? I'm all for a reform of the UN, but I'm afraid the encyclical calls for a reform that would give UN more (not less) centralized power. And what does it mean to have a family of nations with real teeth?

"...This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. ..."

I'm afraid His Holiness Benedict the XVIth has just lost one Latvian fan.

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 2

Whose Culture? Which Collective?

Like many in his generation, Snow saw the condition of the individual and of the society as differing problems. He wrote, "Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle--but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle" (6-7). Human life is bounded by the tragedy of death, and thus, the best hope for humanity in the meanwhile is an end to physical want and suffering. The dilemma as Snow saw it is that the literati fall back in despair, idealizing a traditional aristocratic past, while the scientists seek to reverse suffering, functioning as optimistic stoics in the face of biological decay.

Leavis, as Roger Kimball notes, did understand what was at stake in Snow's distinction between a tragic existential solitaire and a supposed social deliverance. Leavis charged: "What is the 'social hope' that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic condition of each individual? Where, if not in individuals, is what is hoped for … to be located? Or are we to find the reality of life in hoping for other people a kind of felicity about which as proposed for ourselves . . . we have no illusions?" (53). Snow held scientists to be "a culture on the rise," while the literary culture he charged with fearing the future. Leavis, on the other hand, held out hope for what Matthew Arnold had called, "the criticism of life" as giving the individual some measure of success against a technologically oppressive society. Close to the heart of this debate was (and still is) the nature of human meaning and of human happiness and the location of both.

Part of this search for happiness had to do with the very nature of culture as a concept. Snow took a fair amount of criticism for his own use of the word "culture" in the Rede Lecture to describe his two sets of intellectuals. Some objectors insisted that he was really describing a struggle inside one culture, while others argued the term itself was ambiguous at best. Many thought the word was obscurely employed. Yet he defended the word as being clear for most of his audience, indicating "intellectual development, development of the mind." At the same time, he admitted the anthropological definition was also present in his argument since culture indicated a certain shared behavior (62-64).

For Snow, culture meant both a way of living and the educational development of students' native abilities. Leavis, sensing the battle lay in this direction, charged Snow with using "culture" as a mask for intellectual conformity and dull bias; Leavis labeled the Rede Lecture "a document for the study of cliché" (50). Snow's tomfoolery was in reducing intellectual culture to the anthropological--an "everyone knows" mentality. Snow, it seems, had four cultures on his hands, not just two, and quite possibly many more--not only the culture of science and the humanities, but culture as a thing to be cultivated and as a description of social existence, as well as culture as intellectual practice and as pedagogical methodology. His faith in his audience's understanding was in that sense misplaced. "Culture" by the 1950s and 60s, as I've noted in previous posts, was already a deeply contested term, one with a chameleon's ability to ever shift in the hands of its user. Indeed, the pedagogical and anthropological meanings were by no means in easy consensus, and Leavis' vehement response only shows this.

For some the jeremiads of Snow and Leavis amounted to what place the individual had in the collective. With his own 1962 Commentary essay, "The Leavis-Snow Controversy," literary humanist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling entered the debate, which he described as "a miasma of personality-mongering" (150). Trilling believed that Leavis, despite his personal vendetta and bile, held that "moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, [is] the very root of poetic genius" (151), a position to which Trilling was somewhat sympathetic. Leavis he felt saw literature in much the same way as Arnold saw the "criticism of life." Snow's lecture was, then, a counter-attack on literature seen as a threat to national and global prosperity. It insisted that the literary culture must follow the scientific lead and not act "the part of a loyal opposition" (161). But for Leavis and Trilling this could only deny literature's prime purpose, that is to offer its audience an escape from the confines of the techno-social bondage of modernity, to explore and be free. Trilling recognized in both Snow and Leavis a Christian rhetoric, though one long secularized. Trilling himself was suspicious of Leavis' talk of pedagogical deliverance through a class of aesthetes:

It assumes that all things are causative or indicative of the whole of the cultural life, it proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action. An instance of mediocrity or failure in art or thought is not only what it is but also a sin, deserving to be treated as such. These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism. (174)

Trilling felt a more moderate approach was needed. Of course, Snow and Leavis were each in turn blind to this soteriological undercurrent. Snow would remark in passing that for certain scientists with religious faith "the sense of the tragic condition [might] not be so strong," but for "most people of deep feeling" this very secular tragedy of existence could not be evaded (6). In turn, Leavis could dismiss Snow's "social hope" as the typical religious "refus[al] to live on the spot where one is" (54). If international community of science seemed to offer one kind of cultural salvation, an end to the poor relations across the Iron Curtain, the "whole man" theory of education (as Trilling would later write) "now stands virtually in the place of religion and may even be thought of as itself a religion" and is "directed toward moral and spiritual renovation; its subject is damnation and salvation" (219, 231).

Trilling observes, "No, the world will not be saved by teaching English at universities, nor, indeed, by any other literary activity. It is very hard to say what will save the world. But we can be perfectly certain that denying the actualities of the world will not work its salvation" (163). Of what Leavis could accuse Snow, Trilling could in turn accuse Leavis and Snow. Each it seems was dealing in the evangelistic revival business. Both, he thought were suspiciously blind to "a politics of a quite ultimate kind . . . the disposition of the modern mind" (148). Trilling recommended a bridge between the two positions, a kind of clinging to the hope of the life of the mind: "The idea of mind which had taught the bookbinder's apprentice to embark on his heroic enterprise of self-instruction also taught the great scientist to place himself beyond specialness of interest which groups prescribe for their members" (176-177).

That we can no longer recommend this disinterestedness without a snort of incredulity is itself a cause for reflection.