Faithful Imagination in the Academy: Explorations in Religious Belief and Scholarship

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Religious Studies | Intellectual History

“Faithful Imagination in the Academy takes the faith and learning discussion beyond the emphasis on argument to clear vision; beyond combative metaphors to dialogue; and beyond an apologetic tone to invitation. The book provokes intrigue and puzzlement through concrete examples of what scholars have actually tried to do, rather than speculating on what might be possible.” —Shirley A. Mullen, Houghton College

In the past thirty years there has been a sea change in North American intellectual life regarding the role of religious commitments in academic endeavors. Driven partly by postmodernism and the fragmentation of knowledge and partly by the democratization of the academy in which different voices are celebrated, the appropriate role that religion should play is contested. Some academics insist that religion cannot and must not have a place at the academic table; others insist that religious values should drive the argument. Faithful Imagination in the Academy takes an approach based on dialogue with various viewpoints, claiming neither too much nor too little. All the authors are seasoned academics with many significant publications to their credit. While they all know how the academy operates and how to make worthwhile contributions in their respective disciplines, they are also Christians whose religious commitments are reflected in their intellectual work. Contributors Janel M. Curry, Mark Fackler, Susan M. Felch, John Hare, Del Ratzsch, Kurt C. Schaefer, Helen M. Sterk, David A. Van Baak, Ronald A. Wells JANEL M. CURRY is professor of geography and dean for research and scholarship at Calvin College. RONALD A. WELLS is director of the Maryville Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College.

For orders and information please contact the publisher LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.lexingtonbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2547-2 ISBN-10: 0-7391-2547-8

FAITHFUL IMAGINATION IN THE ACADEMY

“First-order scholarship by Christian believers is no longer a rarity. Yet, because of the multiplied complexities of existence, there is an ongoing need for learning that moves from general Christian perspectives to specific intellectual challenges. The chapters of this book show how convincingly that scholarship can be carried out. The book’s breadth combines with the depth of its individual chapters to make a compelling statement.” —Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

CURRY AND WELLS

“A dazzling display of the power of a Christian mind; top-notch authors at the top of their game. This book shows how fearless and honest Christians should engage the contemporary world.” —C. Stephen Evans, Baylor University

FAITHFUL IMAGINATION IN THE ACADEMY

Explorations in Religious Belief and Scholarship

JANEL M. CURRY RONALD A. WELLS

EDITED BY AND

Faithful Imagination in the Academy

Faithful Imagination in the Academy Explorations in Religious Belief and Scholarship

Edited by Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books “First Lesson in Rhetoric,” from Purpaleanie and Other Permutations by Sietze Buning. Copyright © 1978 by Middleburg Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faithful imagination in the academy : explorations in religious belief and scholarship / edited by Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2547-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2547-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3035-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3035-8 (electronic) 1. Theology—Congresses. I. Curry, Janel M., 1956– II. Wells, Ronald, 1941– BR41.F35 2008 261.5—dc22 2008023384 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

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Introduction Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

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Part I: Probing Linguistic and Moral Coherence 1

Words and Things: The Hope of Perspectival Realism Susan M. Felch

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Can We Be Good without God? John Hare

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Part II: Questioning Assumptions Underlying Science 3

Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? David A. Van Baak

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Design in Nature: What Is Science Properly Permitted to Think? Del Ratzsch

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Part III: Truth Telling and Truth Searching 5

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Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West: Josiah Royce and American Memory Ronald A. Wells Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place Mark Fackler v

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Contents

Part IV: Imagining a World 7

Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective Helen M. Sterk

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American Poverty Policy: Concerns about the Nature of Persons in a Good Society Kurt C. Schaefer

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Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure: A Case Study of Great Barrier Island, New Zealand Janel M. Curry

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The authors whose chapters appear in this book did not start out believing their work would end up in a common volume. This book came about because the two editors and the Provost of Calvin College, Dr. Claudia Beversluis, believed that it might, or should, be so. We all—editors, authors, and provost alike—believe deeply both in scholarship rooted in a liberal arts consciousness, formed in a faith-related context, and in its dissemination both to general readers and to teacher-scholars in institutions of higher learning. The chapters in this book are by no means thought to be anything like the last word on the chosen subject for the various disciplines. We have a more modest goal. These essays are contributions to the ongoing and widespread revisionist project that asks the question: What can it mean for scholars to integrate their faith with their academic work? As much for scholars in so-called secular universities as for colleagues in church-related liberal arts colleges, we offer this work as an example of what faith-based discourse might possibly amount to. In the past thirty years, there has been a sea change in North American intellectual life regarding the role of religious commitments in academic endeavors. That change has been driven partly by postmodernism and the concomitant fragmentation of knowledge and partly by the democratization of the academy in which different voices are celebrated. However, the appropriate role that religion should play in all this is contested: some academics still insist that religion cannot and must not have a place at the academic table or it will not be academics at all; others insist that religious values should drive the argument. vii

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Preface and Acknowledgments

This book takes a determinedly moderate approach, claiming neither too much nor too little. All the authors are seasoned, veteran academics with many significant publications to their credit. We all know how the academy operates and how to make worthwhile contributions in our respective disciplines. At the same time, we are people of faith who want to demonstrate how religious commitments are reflected in our intellectual work. In this respect, we respond in advance to two possible objections: to those who think that religion does not and cannot have a place in academic discourse, we ask that they give these essays an honest and open reading; to those scholars of faith who think that one’s academic conclusions should be substantially—some would say antithetically—different from secular people, we ask that they, too, give us an honest and open reading before they express their possible disappointment at our cautious approach. These essays were first delivered as lectures when we were “The Calvin Worldview Lecturer.” That program was conceived of, and administered by, Calvin College and Chaplaincy Ministry of the Christian Reformed Church. In brief, the program releases a Calvin faculty member from teaching each academic year so that the person might travel to lecture at universities that invite us. We were meant, as far as possible, to work with university chaplains, who were to negotiate invitations for us at departmental lectures, colloquia, and seminars. We lecturers were meant to go to secular universities, not theological seminaries or church-related liberal arts colleges. The editors of this volume asked each Calvin Lecturer from the inception of the program in 1998 to 2006 to give us the lecture that best represents the dynamic that went on in universities from British Columbia and Ontario to California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico and from Switzerland and Britain to New Zealand, Kenya, and Korea. The various authors have worked with the editors to bring their spoken presentations into the literary essays found in this book. We should say that there is one essay in the group that was not given by a Calvin Lecturer, as such. Janel Curry, as dean for research at Calvin, has the oversight role for the lectureship, so she was closely associated with the program. Her coeditor in this book noted the relative lack of essays in the social sciences; thus it was decided that she contribute an essay that was in the spirit of the lectureship. We think her work demonstrates and illustrates the intent of the book in a discipline and a geographic area that had not otherwise been touched. We could not have done this book without the human encouragements and financial assistance of two successive provosts at Calvin College, Joel Carpenter and Claudia Beversluis, and three successive deans for research, Stephen Evans, Shirley Roels, and the present coeditor Janel Curry. We thank them heartily. Special thanks are due the Rev. William van Groningen, the head of CRC chaplains when the program was conceived, and to

Preface and Acknowledgments

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the Rev. Peter Schuurman, whose leadership from 2004 onward gave fresh energy and resolve. We also thank the various chaplains whose hard work on our behalf facilitated many good venues. While all chaplains did good work for us, we risk singling out one for his outstanding leadership and assistance, the Rev. Dr. Michael Fallon, at McMaster University in Ontario. We thank Dawn Crook for providing the administrative support for the lectureship program and for her help with this project. Finally, we thank James Bratt, Donna Romanowski, and Dale Williams at the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship, whose human and financial help at a key stage was critical and much appreciated. Last, we thank our publisher, Jon Sisk at Rowman & Littlefield, who always seems open to new ideas. We hope and trust that these essays will find their way into the hands of comrades in the cause of liberal arts faith-based scholarship, and into those of people who might want to know, perhaps for the first time, what all this discourse regarding faith-based scholarship is all about.

Introduction Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

Many Christian academics feel themselves to be “outsiders in the sacred grove” when it comes to their faith and their scholarly life. Mark Schwehn depicts this well in his book, Exiles from Eden.1 We feel on the outside whether it is over against enlightenment secular rationalism or postmodern relativism, but as Schwehn points out, higher learning needs religion in order to flourish. This book illustrates this need. It reflects an attempt to focus disciplinary knowledge toward deeper understanding that would not be possible without a religious perspective. Thus, this book models both the need of the faith community to honor intellectual life and the need of the academy to reach deeper for intellectual life that also seeks religious understanding. The intellectual work presented in this book can be seen as the outgrowth of two intellectual streams, often portrayed at odds with each other. The first stream is postmodernism. Postmodernism has undermined the Enlightenment models of scientific detachment, showing that they do not provide the objectivity once believed. While perhaps at times advocating a position of our being unable to ascertain any truth at all, the postmodern intellectual tradition has unknowingly opened up new venues for the development and advocacy of a particular faith perspective in academic disciplines. The irony of this opening for intellectual work informed by faith commitments is that such work often questions the very assumptions of postmodernism. This volume is no different. Postmodernism has been portrayed as the search for community that ends up being one person at each table alone. The chapters in this volume, the result of the opening created by postmodernism, however, ask us to confront a different reality that leads us to a different end point—being made in the image of God 1

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means that we are inherently relational. Understanding comes through knowing who we are, and part of that personhood is a call to be a member of a community. The postmodern era has created an environment in which religiously informed scholarly thought has deepened and matured, undermining the relativism of postmodernism itself. As faithful scholarship has matured, the audience of this scholarship has moved from being largely a Christian audience, to being able to gain a place at the table with other intellectual sparring partners within the secular university. This book also represents some of the best of this growing dialogue at the table across many disciplines, from philosophy to physics to economics. All of these chapters were developed for presentation at secular universities, to primarily disciplinary audiences, but with an explicit or implicit faith perspective. As is evidenced in this volume, such scholarly engagement has come a great distance from some of its earlier stages. It has grown from more generalist statements on the Christian mind such as those expressed in Harry Blamires’s The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?2 and the works of Francis Schaeffer, who addressed an educated popular audience, to more disciplinary works with expanded audiences.3 Key works that have both argued for this direction of scholarship are Mark Noll and George Marsden. Noll, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, spoke to a Christian audience, stating, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”4 He argued against the anti-intellectualism of American evangelicalism and for more responsible intellectual work from this community. Marsden spoke to a largely secular, academic audience, arguing for the inclusion of faith commitments in the public academic sphere alongside such perspectives such as race and gender. This argument is possible because of the openings created by postmodernism. He argues that this adds to the richness of intellectual life. He states, “Religious commitments, after all, are basic to the identities and social location of many if not most human beings, and academics routinely recognize such factors as having intellectual significance . . . Nonetheless it is not unusual for otherwise judicious scholars to dismiss the idea of the relevance of religious perspectives to respectable scholarship as absurd.”5 On the heels of Noll and Marsden, Calvin College convened a conference in the fall of 2001, in honor of its 125th anniversary celebration. The conference’s focus was on how religious perspectives might play a significant role in American academic life. At this conference, Richard J. Mouw gave an assessment of Christian scholarship, a “state of the state” of Christian scholarship.6 He echoed both Marsden and Noll. He reminded secular academicians that all intellectual life is infused with faith and thus could not be excluded from discussions in the academy. All intellectual activity is guided by presuppositions and faith commitments, and such thought at its

Introduction

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best is self-consciously explicit about its intellectual starting points, modeling transparency in the academy. Mouw also reminded the Christian community that the call to cultivate a disciplined mind that struggled with deep intellectual challenges was a divine summons and should not be devalued by the Christian community.7 Mouw identified several trends that appear in the chapters in this book. The first such trend, evident in all the works that follow, is that the faithdirected voice is now part of the mainstream. Rather than battling over against the larger intellectual culture, lodging critiques from the margins, we have begun to form networks within the mainstream academy. Ideas are no longer used as weapons but rather provide currency that facilitates dialogue and work with people with whom we might disagree on major issues.8 The chapters in this book all speak as part of dialogues already underway within disciplines or subject areas. Mouw claims that Christians in the past have either abandoned the public square, or tried to take it over. He calls this the triumphalism of past Christian scholarship.9 All the works in this book represent a move away from triumphalism and toward dialogue with the academic mainstream. While more modest in its hopes for success, Mouw claims that it produces scholarship with more depth.10 The depth of this type of scholarship is illustrated in these chapters. Each was developed in the context of presentations at major secular universities, with the goal of inviting dialogue rather than either abandoning the public square or trying to take it over. Thus, each chapter requires that the scholar write across boundaries—bridging disciplinary communities with the church-related academic community, or larger Christian community, as well as explaining religious perspectives to secular disciplinary audiences. This is the reason each of the scholars writing here writes within both the context of a discipline and its form of argumentation and evidence and speaks to the issues being addressed by that discipline. This book is unique in its desire to bridge these divides, and in its being “field tested.” While bridging disciplinary discussions with the faith community in general, the chapters also clearly draw on the breadth of specifically Christian traditions, yet one more characteristic of contemporary Christian scholarship identified by Mouw.11 These traditions are not limited to the West either. Faith-informed scholarship, reflecting larger intellectual trends, has increasingly recognized social and cultural context, drawing our attention to different ways in which the Christian message is expressed in a variety of cultural contexts.12 Fackler’s chapter represents an explicit attempt to acknowledge and draw upon religious perspectives that come from one area of the developing world as well as from Western cultural sources. Others, such as Van Baak’s, lay the groundwork for questioning the hegemonic worldview of the West.

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PROBING LINGUISTIC AND MORAL COHERENCE Susan Felch, a professor of English, illustrates in her chapter the need to hold on to both the reality of perspective and also the hope of understanding through language. She draws on the work of Russian thinker Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin and counters the reductionistic tendencies of linguistics in its attempt to understand language. Rather than language being made of structure that can be objectively described as it “really” is, Felch argues for a view of language that it ultimately relational and meaningful. Language speaks about the world but also speaks to others, and, it is a messy affair. Drawing on Bakhtin, Felch states, “Words are necessarily tethered to the world, to other people, and to God . . . to understand words well; we must have an explanation of language that takes into account all three of these tethers.” Abstract analysis takes too much of the world and our relationships out of its understanding. Language ultimately involves an irreducible community of two that cannot be understood apart from that reality. Felch argues for perspectival realism, arguing for the reality of the world—there is a world; we can know the world; there are rights and wrongs—but our understandings are always local and particular. Through the medium of language, Felch touches on many of the themes that follow in subsequent chapters, the humility required from the recognition of our limited perspective, the search for understanding that recognizes the reality of a world created by God, and the recognition that we are creatures created for community. Philosopher John Hare illustrates yet another theme that arises out of these chapters. In his chapter, he uses the tools of his discipline to show the inherent instability of morality without God. This illustrates a maturing of Christian scholarship, where it is placed in dialogue with the tradition of a discipline, arguing for a position within the methods and rules of that particular academic tradition.

NATURAL SCIENCE—QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING SCIENCE David Van Baak, a physicist, compares a mechanical picture of the universe with a competing nonmechanical view of the universe. He shows how neither view is within the power of physical science to establish, which is a truer depiction of the deep nature of the world. Either can fully and accurately describe basic behavior of matter. Speaking out of his discipline, he points out that the goal of theory if more than prediction of experimental

Introduction

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results—we expect more from theory. In fact, the history and philosophy of science would support the deeper or more fundamental theory as the one to be more fruitful. He then delves into explanations on why Western science has privileged mechanical views of the universe in spite of its understanding of theory. Yet, reflecting the humility of present-day Christian scholarship, he does not conclude that we must accept the nonmechanical view of the universe and that this proves the existence of God. Rather, his argument is more nuanced—that scientific knowledge is not a prerequisite for warranted belief in the existence of God. Furthermore, the fact that two such theories can coexist defeats the claim that a scientific worldview requires the adoption of a mechanistic worldview, and, further, scientific theorizing is entirely open to purpose and factors outside itself in order to answer the question of the deep character of the world. Philosopher Del Ratzsch likewise argues clearly from within the bounds of philosophy of science in his chapter. He purposefully leaves aside the question of whether there is empirical data at present to support design theories and instead addresses the question of whether it is even legitimate to appeal to the concept of intelligent design in the context of natural science. He works through the question by unmasking many of the assumptions underlying those that reject the question as falling within science. This is done through a deep understanding, historically and philosophically, of the arguments surrounding what defines science. Some of the issues addressed include (1) the justification for taking methodological naturalism as characterizing science, and (2) questioning a normative definition of science. Instead of placing it in the context of historical changes and its being a human construction, the concept of strict falsifiability as a basis of scientific legitimacy. He then turns the argument toward arguing that methodological naturalistic constraints actually have downsides: “the basic problem with prestipulated conceptual-theoretical boundaries is that if reality itself happens to fall outside those boundaries, theorizing within the confines of those boundaries will inevitably generate either incompleteness or error.” Thus, he shows how science cannot restrict itself to the natural while assuming it can get to all truth. When methodological naturalism does so, it becomes something akin to philosophical naturalism, and such assumptions stop the exploration of where evidence may lead, keeping explanatory headway from being made. Ratzsch concludes that there might be no plausible evidence for intelligent design and deliberate agency, but that there is nothing inherently unscientific about the idea or about its being empirically investigated. To stop the exploration is a detriment to science and our understanding of the empirical world around us. Science is thus missing something significant when it excludes purpose and intention from being explored empirically.

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TRUTH TELLING AND TRUTH SEARCHING Van Baak and Ratzsch represent a tradition of religious scholarship that unmasks assumptions underlying the practice, in this case, of science. Historian Ronald Wells illustrates one of the trends identified by Mouw—the move away from triumphalism in Christian scholarship. Conflicts between and among peoples involve both the telling of stories and the keeping of memories. Wells asks questions about the use of memory, reflected in interpretations of history, to support the status quo, those in power, or nationalistic ideologies. He uses the insights and debates surrounding the early California historian Josiah Royce as a model of truth telling to allow us to explore how and when nations or peoples might make confession of, and ask forgiveness for, past wrongs and injustices. The story of California and its history also continues to remind us of the need to allow space for all stories or perspectives to be told, not just the stories of the victors. It is only in this honesty and asking for forgiveness that shalom can arise. Mark Fackler, professor of communication, goes a step further in his chapter and argues that we need the voices of Africa in order to build a more responsible media in the West. He argues that “a vision for humanity held deeply in the traditions of Africa may be pivotal to a renewal of vision for public media in America.” The freedom of expression in the West comes from the Enlightenment doctrine of the individual as moral center. The liberal view of the press arose out of this Enlightenment worldview. The discovery of this open marketplace of ideas in Africa has been used to increase government accountability and foster indigenous development. Yet, Fackler argues, the classical liberal theory of the press has come up short in that in the West its lack of boundaries is causing it to buckle under its own weight from everything from sexually provocative speech to commercial messaging. We need community norms, or speech dissolves social trust. The liberal model has little to teach us here. Fackler argues, though, that African views of humanity, and what it means to be made in the image of God, can contribute to the theoretical work that allows us to move beyond our Western conundrum. African theology emphasizes the Trinity where community life is central, with connectedness, communitarian caregiving, and mutual accountability at its heart. Such a view of the moral life would have us adjust the aims of media toward the bonds that hold people together, reflecting the true nature of what it means to be “created in God’s image.”

IMAGINING A WORLD Another scholar of communication, Helen Sterk, explores further the concept of personhood, imagining a world where gender partnership is possible and

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care for all people is prevalent. She argues that the dominant cultural worldview that continues to frame women and men as opposites keeps inequalities in place. Furthermore, this worldview portrays men and women as unable to understand each other. In contrast, Sterk argues for a recognition of gendered qualities of life that honors the fluidity of the meaning of gender, resulting in partnership. Echoing some of the other authors’ calls for dialogue over domination, she argues for the inclusion of faith and life traditions in the public intellectual space, rejecting both Christian triumphalism as well as secular triumphalism. This invitational rhetoric assumes that we can find a cooperative way of living together in the world. Sterk develops this vision of cooperation in the context of gender relations. She unmasks the assumption that there is something inherent in biology that determines how humans act in masculine or feminine ways. Such a view limits our understanding of the person. She believes that God made us as embodied individuals, but these bodies are embedded in social and cultural systems. A rigid ideology based on biology subordinates being human to being male (masculine) or female (feminine), limiting our visions or possibilities for change in society or our imagination on what is possible. Her vision of partnership is informed by a trinitarian theology and an ethic of care. Both perspectives argue that humans are inherently relational and that their dependency is a part of being human. Such a perspective on what it means to be human is an image of not the solitary self but the connective self—for both men and women. The connective self holds rights and responsibilities as flexible, as in creative tension, much as Jesus’s admonition to “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The focus moves from polarized gender relations to operating under an ethic of care where individuals are not essentialized or compartmentalized but rather find themselves flexing in relation to the needs of others, in the context of particular contexts, and over a lifetime of change and growth. Economist Kurt Schaefer struggles with how care becomes embedded in social policy in a way that people of faith can engage in it with a clear conscience. In this chapter, he uses the tools of economics to analyze the effects of welfare policy over the past forty years, while asking us to hold on to the dual goals of building right relationships in society and supporting virtuous behavior. In this social-science version of truth telling, he asks us to set aside our preconceptions and attempt to honestly look at which institutional frameworks are closest to achieving those dual goals and, thus, represent the most effective way to care for the poor. In doing so, Schaefer points to the particular as well as to the tension between structures and individual virtue. Such an approach shows that persons are not merely individuals but part of many different communities, imaging the Trinity. Schaefer develops a perspective on societal structures for caring for the vulnerable around the Scriptural vision of true humanity as one of “virtuous persons living in right community.”

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This volume is rounded out by the chapter written by geographer Janel Curry. In a way, the sensibilities and insights developed in it illustrate a conclusion toward which the book had been tending. Here is a scholar using empirical work in her discipline to ask questions that transcend her discipline. The work is a case study of the connection between the worlds of nature and of humanly constructed society. Curry begins by showing the clash of worldviews among government bureaucrats, business people, and the indigenous people on the question of how to sustain life and livelihood on New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island. The government’s faith in the international market economy cannot result in good policy for all. This is so because neoliberal economics does not, because it cannot, take into account the knowledge of local people in a given ecosystem and how that ecosystem can be preserved while giving people a livelihood in the market economy. For Curry, this can be resolved by ontology, a theology and a social science methodology that suggests the relationality of all things. She utilized the path-breaking work of Douglas Hall and Colin Gunton to root her analysis of the interconnectedness of human and human-made institutions. All the scholars whose work is represented in this volume are driven by a deep love for reality and for God’s world. They have felt the calling to love this reality through delving deeply into its secrets in all honesty, integrity, and intellectual ability. As such, they also find that, along with Richard Mouw, “To love reality in its depths means that we cannot help but grieve over the brokenness and woundedness of God’s world in its present condition.”13

NOTES 1. Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1963). 3. For examples, see Richard Hughes, The Vocation of a Christian Scholar: How Christian Life Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005); Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991); Henk Aay and Sander Griffioen, eds., Geography and Worldview: A Christian Reconnaissance (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998); Arthur Holmes, The Idea of the Christian College (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987); Arthur Holmes, The Making of a Christian Mind: A Christian Worldview and the Academic Enterprise (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986); Ronald A. Wells, ed., History and the Christian Historian (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998); Janel M. Curry and

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Steven McGuire, Community on Land: Community, Ecology, and the Public Interest (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 4. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 3. 5. George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. Richard J. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going,” in Christian Scholarship . . . for What? ed. Susan M. Felch (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College, 2003), 7–21. 7. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 9. 8. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 11. 9. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 11–12. 10. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 12. 11. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 14. 12. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 16–17. 13. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 20.

I PROBING LINGUISTIC AND MORAL COHERENCE

1 Words and Things: The Hope of Perspectival Realism Susan M. Felch

“There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get unbirthday presents,” said Humpty Dumpty, “and only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter 6

Words, things, birthdays, arguments, un-birthday presents, and glory— along with mad hatters, mock turtles, and tipsy tea parties—it is just these wild juxtapositions and absurdities that delight us as we hustle along the winding paths of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. If we were to stop for a moment to catch our breath and think about this particular argument between an arrogant egg and a determined little girl, we might find it not so wild or absurd after all. In fact, we might find ourselves asking some similar questions: How does language actually work? Can you make a word mean whatever you “choose it to mean”? Given the miscues that are rife in this passage, how is it that Alice and Humpty Dumpty even manage to carry on 13

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a conversation? Is it not the case, even in our ordinary day-to-day conversations, that words do indeed “mean so many different things”? Such questions about language are not new. In nearly every one of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, he creates scenes that revolve around the slipperiness of speech and writing: clever puns trip up the brightest characters, lovers are deceived into jealous anger by the merest whisper, and ambiguous letters go astray. Nevertheless, questions about language have taken on a new urgency in the last hundred years. “Language is the house of being,” wrote Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism,1 setting off a scramble among philosophers who careened into its rooms and began to rearrange the furniture, inaugurating in the process what is often called the “linguistic turn” in modern thought. Literary scholars, who had always loved language and explored its intricate curves, now began to focus their attention on its more angular formal elements. Even the hard sciences were affected. Thomas Kuhn announced that normal science operates by way of paradigms, which are linguistic descriptions of reality, not reality itself. He controversially claimed that such paradigms are overturned or replaced not so much by the discovery of new data as by the creation of new descriptions that better fit the existing data.2 Michael Polanyi, taking a somewhat different tack, pressed the notion that personal knowledge, mediated through language, accounted for scientific discourse as much as did physical facts.3 This linguistic turn in all its guises avoided, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Jonathan Culler, “the unseemly rush from word to world”4 by focusing attention on words themselves rather than on the things they might point to. Among literary people, no one was more influential in stopping this unseemly rush from word to world than a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), whose classroom lecture notes were published posthumously in 1916 as Cours de linguistique générale (The Course in General Linguistics). This slender volume set the direction of language studies for the remainder of the twentieth century. Saussure’s predecessors had been German-trained philologists—”lovers of words”—who were keenly interested in the historical development of languages and the classification of language groups. These were the men (and a few women) who discovered that Sanskrit was related to Latin, who posited an Indo-European family of languages, and who compiled the massive twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, which sorted out historical definitions and source languages for thousands of English words. Saussure, however, was impatient with the collecting impulses of the late Victorians. He insisted that modern linguistics be modeled after the hypothesis-driven agendas of the hard sciences and thus be enabled to carve out for itself a place in the modern research university. To do so, linguistics must abandon philology, with its emphasis on historical development and language classification, and study

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a particular language at a particular time; it must, in his terms, abandon diachrony for synchrony. At the heart of Saussure’s new theory of language were two key hypotheses. The first concerned the nature of words. Words, he said, are signs composed of two parts: the signifier (sounds or written marks) and the signified (the concept that is attached to the signifier). To put it another way, the signifier and the signified together make up the sign, which is itself like a coin with two inseparable sides—heads and tails. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary but not individual. That is, I do not attach signifiers to signifieds (unless I am composing an idiosyncratic language), but rather I am inculcated into the system of signs that we call English as I learn my mother tongue. That system consists of signs whose signifiers and signifieds are conjoined in stable, but arbitrary, relationships. For instance, there is no necessary, inner relationship between the signifier tree and the concept of a large, woody, perennial plant, but once such a connection is made, says Saussure, the sign is “fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it.”5 When an English speaker says tree, other English speakers think of a large, woody plant. The relationship of the sign (signifier + signified) to any object in the outside world (the referent or the real tree) is also arbitrary, but Saussure considered this notion of reference to be of relatively little interest to the linguist. Furthermore, because these signs do not have any essential or inherent meaning in and of themselves, they accrue meaning only within the system of language: Each sign differs from other signs. We thus think large woody plant when we hear tree, but small stinging insect when we hear bee or a payment when we hear fee. It is the difference among the signs within a system, not any inherent essence in each individual word, that gives meaning to tree, bee, and fee. The second hypothesis had to do with the nature of language. Saussure posited that language could be divided into an abstract system of rules (langue) and the actual concrete sentences that people speak (parole). For Saussure, only langue was the proper subject matter for the linguist—the system of language and not actual speech, which was too messy for careful analysis. Because Saussure wanted to construct linguistics as a scientific discipline, he was interested neither in the referent (the object in the outside world) nor in parole (the actual sentences we use in everyday life). He wanted rather to focus on signs and on langue, the system of signs that undergirds any particular instance of parole. In fact, he thought that no systematic study could be undertaken of parole because it consisted of millions of idiosyncratic and individual choices made on the basis of a common langue. He felt pretty confident that by bracketing the referent and ignoring parole you could map out with a fair degree of certainty the structure of language and so describe what language really is. You could, in other words,

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resolve the argument between Humpty Dumpty and Alice as to what words mean and how they come to have those meanings. The linguists who followed Saussure eagerly embraced his hypothesis of words as signs composed of signifier and signified and his insistence on the study of langue. In North America, the linguist Noam Chomsky modulated langue into the psychological notion of linguistic competency and parole into linguistic performance. The “Chomskyan revolution,” as it is often called, decreed that all grammatical sentences in ordinary language (parole) could be generated or transformed from a set of rules descriptive of its deep structure (langue)—hence, the term transformational grammar. On the Continent, Saussurean linguistics was influential in the developing science of semiotics, the study of sign systems as diverse as traffic signals and high fashion, and in the anthropological paradigms of such scholars as Claude Levi-Strauss. It was also picked up in the 1960s by the young French philosopher Jacques Derrida. There were, however, those who questioned Saussure’s turn away from philology to linguistics and none more important than the Russian thinker Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He was born in 1895 in Russia to moderately affluent parents who provided him with a cosmopolitan education. Bakhtin may have learned German from his nanny; he studied Danish on his own when he was a teenager so that he could read Kierkegaard in his native tongue; he pursued classical studies at Petrograd University, and, in his late twenties and thirties, took up with a group of musicians, scholars, and teachers to form what is now known as the Nevel circle. In 1929, he was arrested by the Stalinist government for alleged activity in the underground Russian Orthodox Church and was sentenced to internal exile. After years of obscurity, he was rediscovered in 1961 by a group of graduate students who promoted the publication of his work, both before and after his death in 1975. Although, after 1929, Bakhtin was cut off from the larger academic world, he did know the work of Saussure, and it worried him. “To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined,” he declared, seeing in Saussure that growing tendency evident in other academic disciplines to overvalue abstraction.6 In fact, Bakhtin’s worry about the encroaching role of theory and its deleterious effect on literature, the arts, and ethics was such that he devoted one of his early works, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, to considering the relationship between theory and experience. The world in which we live, says Bakhtin, is full, rich, and open-ended, and our experiences in this world are so layered and complex that any attempt to explain them is doomed to failure. Yet, we want and need to talk about our lives. Thus, we construct explanations, we form theories, we

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tell stories, and all these verbal acts serve a very useful function in helping us organize and understand who we are and the world in which we live. Nevertheless, such finite intellectual endeavors—whether they are constructed formally as academic disciplines or informally as we talk with family and friends about our everyday lives—inevitably, and in principle, fail to comprehend the complex context of life, the real world in which we live. Theories, therefore, can never be more than partial descriptions, perspectival approximations “of the actual . . . experiencing of the world.”7 The problem with theories, however, is that they tend toward imperialism. Forgetting that they provide merely a perspective on the world, they begin instead to claim that they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—even when, as will happen later in the century, the very notion of truth is held suspect. Theory, says Bakhtin, “seeks to pass itself off as the whole world” rather than, more appropriately, and humbly, to acknowledge that it is merely a tool, a heuristic device, one way of partially understanding the world in which we live.8 In particular, a theory that cuts off signs from their referents and relegates language to a system not only thins out language—by taking from words their three-dimensional referentiality—but it also robs language of its personal dimension. Not only are we no longer speaking about the world, but we are no longer speaking to or with other people. Here, in contrast, is how Bakhtin understands the relationship of language to things and to people: Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group. . . . The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words and variously evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the elements in this environment and striking a dissonance with others, is able, in this dialogized process, to shape its own stylistic profile and tone.9

Even if we do not immediately grasp the significance of this quote, and the language is dense, there is a distinct difference in tone between Bakhtin and Saussure. Bakhtin does not divide language into langue and parole, nor does he privilege langue. Rather than categorizing language as system, he begins with concrete discourse or utterance, that is, with real words that are actually spoken by real people. Language—in all the ways that really matter, even in a theoretical account—is not an abstract system but is already

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embroiled in communicating with real people. Furthermore, language is necessarily attached to referents—to objects in the real world. There can be no bracketing of the referent as merely incidental because language is embedded in prepositions. We speak about things to other people. In other words, whenever we begin to talk about something—that object to which words are directed—we find that someone else has been there before us. Their words form an obscuring mist or, perhaps better, a sort of gloaming light. Our own words enter into “this dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment” that is already filled with the words and perspectives of other people. Our words harmonize with some, strike a dissonance with others, but eventually begin to find their “own stylistic profile and tone.” As Bakhtin understands language, we do not simply exchange signs, we use words that come to us richly textured with past uses and many voices. We do not mechanically generate sentences from a system of langue, we use concrete utterances to actually communicate and, alas, to miscommunicate, with other people. For Bakhtin, there is always a “Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any object,”10 a naming that can never exhaust the world, which remains more than a sum of its definitions. There is, consequently, nothing neat about language; it is a messy affair. And Bakhtin worries that if we try to tidy up our theories about language, we will be tempted to substitute our tidy system for the real thing, for the weightiness of language as it takes its place in the world. Additionally, as we shall see later, he also worries that if you bracket out things in the world (the referents) and other living people in order to concentrate on signs and langue, you will be tempted to bracket out God as well. Bakhtin agrees with Saussure that words are not identical to, or isomorphic with, referents, real things in the world—he is not, to use a technical term, a naïve realist. But he disagrees with Saussure that referents are not important to the study of language. Words are necessarily tethered to the world, to other people, and to God.11 And he claims that to understand words well, we must have an explanation of language that takes into account all three of these tethers. Bakhtin was very much aware that in speaking about utterances and objects and dialogical environments and even world, he, too, was theorizing. It is not that theory or abstraction or intellectual analysis are bad; merely that we need, on the one hand, to keep them tethered to material reality and, on the other, to remember that they are merely tools. Abstract analysis can only offer a glimpse, although a very useful glimpse, of the real world. Abstract analysis, however, that brackets out too much material reality, whether things or persons or both, risks the possibility of skewing its interpretations (by using too little data) and thus deforming the world into conformity with its own expectations. Such deformity really matters

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because how you think about the world and about the language that describes that world will have an effect on how you live in the world. We can perhaps better understand Bakhtin’s worries and his alternative approach to words and things by looking at the development of Saussure’s linguistic theory in the work of one of his disciples, Jacques Derrida. It is Derrida himself who claims descent from Saussure. “Now Saussure first of all,” he says, “is the thinker who put the arbitrary character of the sign and the differential character of the sign at the very foundation of general semiology, particularly linguistics. . . . [We retain] at least the framework, if not the content, of this requirement formulated by Saussure.”12 Derrida indeed retains a great deal of Saussurean linguistics, including (1) Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, (2) his focus upon langue, and (3) the bracketing of referents. He also retains Saussure’s claims that signs, which gain their meaning by differing from one another, and the system of language, are what constitute a proper understanding of language. Derrida, however, does make a substantial revision to Saussurean linguistics by dividing the sign, which Saussure had considered indissoluble, and separating the signifier from the signified. In other words, Derrida splits Saussure’s coin: He divides the sign, heads from tails. One can understand the significance of this move by playing a simple game. If you look up the signifier enthusiasm in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, you will find this definition: “belief in special revelations of the Holy Spirit.” Aha, you say, the signifier enthusiasm is defined by a signified, the concept of “revelations.” No, says Derrida, revelation is itself just a signifier, a set of sounds, and if you look up its definition, you get not a signified—a concept—but just another signifier, or set of words. In this case, the signifier is “an act of revealing or communicating divine truth,” which in turn points you to another signifier divine and so on ad infinitum. The system of language, or langue, says Derrida, does not consist of signifiers and signifieds, of sounds and concepts, joined together in a stable, if arbitrary, sign. Rather, it consists of endlessly deferring signifiers that carry meaning only as they differ from one another within langue, the system of language. Différance, the word Derrida coined to designate this understanding of langue, brings together the dual concepts of deferring and differing. Thus, in the 1968 essay entitled “Différance,” Derrida suggests that [o]ne could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring).13

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This is a classic Derridean quotation: it takes binary oppositions (two words that appear to be diametrically opposed to one another, in this case intelligible/sensible; concept/intuition; culture/nature) and asserts that rather than being opposites, the two terms necessary complement or supplement one another. They differ from each other, but they are also linked together in the system of philosophic language (“in the economy of the same”). Rather than being opposites in the traditional sense, each term is necessary to define the other. We understand what these terms mean not in isolation from each other, as independent concepts, but only when we see how each of them “must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same.” Whatever meaning they have cannot be determined from looking carefully at the terms themselves or at any referent to which they might point but must be generated from their never-ending, deferred, oscillating relationship. In this quotation, Derrida also treats us to a characteristic virtuoso display of oscillating grammar as the words seesaw back and forth, never landing at a stable resting place, let alone on a definition, referent, or thing. Derrida also signals an ever-present concern that becomes even more dominant in his later writings, namely that how we talk about language in the world determines to a considerable extent how we live in that world. Derrida is not interested in how pairs of opposites such as “red and blue” or “dogs and cats” might appear “as the différance of the other,” but rather in oppositions that carry a great deal of linguistic and ethical weight. Although he might take an interest in Humpty Dumpty’s signifier glory, he would likely be unmoved by birthday and un-birthday presents. Although by splitting the signifier from the signified and discarding the latter, Derrida’s revision may seem quite radical, it actually is a logical extension of Saussurean linguistics insofar as it recognizes that there is no necessary reason to posit a signified, other than as a nod to tradition. Because language, in all the ways that really count, is an abstract system, you may as well eliminate not just the referent but also the signified, which is simply a halfway house between referents and signifiers. For Bakhtin, however, language, in all the ways that really count, is not an abstract system but a living, breathing entity that is tethered to the material reality of things and bodies. It is embedded in prepositions: we talk about the world to other people. Words, or utterances to use Bakhtin’s term, are always directed toward things, toward objects (material or immaterial) in the world. Or as Annie Dillard puts it, “Words refer, and fiction’s elements must always be bits of world . . . Language is weighted with referents . . . [T]he writer, unlike the painter, sculptor, or composer, cannot form his idea of order directly in his materials; for as soon as he writes the least noun, the whole world starts pouring onto his page.”14 It is not only the whole world that pours out through language but also the words of other people. The importance of considering people—real

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people—when we look at language is summarized in one of Bakhtin’s more provocative, often-cited comments that “in the everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by him will be someone else’s words.”15 By words Bakhtin does not mean just vocabulary but concepts and ideas that are expressed through words. Even so, this is a somewhat startling statement but one that is crucial to Bakhtin’s thought. Words do not belong to us, nor are they part of a neutral system of language. They are out in the world, circulating on the borderlines between ourselves and others. Words are formed in social interaction; they belong to others before they belong to us. After all, he says, “the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather [language] exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions.”16 That is why when Bakhtin talks about language, he does not use terms such as signifier and signified or referent and system. Nor does he think about a single language in isolation from all other languages that exist either now or in the past. Instead, he talks about heteroglossia, which literally means “many tongues.” Bakhtin uses the term to refer to the many languages, dialects, and inflections we hear in our everyday lives—not just American English, Canadian English, and French, for instance, but also the language of our parents, the slang of our friends, academic terminology from various disciplines, the contractual language of our apartment lease, and so forth. We not only hear these languages, but they are the stuff out of which our words, ideas, and concepts—indeed, out of which meaning itself—is formed. Because language is inextricably tethered to other people, we cannot seriously consider any notion of meaning without taking them into account. Thus, it is simply the case that language arises out of an irreducible community of two. In his early works, Bakhtin explores this irreducible community of two through a series of images. First, he tries out the image of sight. Meaning is created, he suggests, when two people who remain irrevocably outside one another exchange “an excess of vision.” When I look at you, I see you as a three-dimensional person, situated within a rich environment. You see me in the same way. Nonetheless, I cannot see myself as a whole being or even the total environment in which I stand. I look out at a horizon, and I see only bits of myself—my arms and legs, perhaps a blurry nose and parts of my torso. I see less of myself than you see, but I see more of you than you can see of yourself. In this way, I offer you a perspective you cannot have of yourself, and you offer me a perspective I cannot have of myself. Because we are outside one another, because we are irreducibly different from one another, we experience an excess of seeing that creates meaning as we offer this perspective to one another, as a gift.17 Language demands such an exchange, a three-dimensional environment or roundness that comes closer to

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the thick richness of lived experience than does the thin linearity of abstract system. What I offer to you and what you offer to me, in our complementary visions, is that environment that we cannot create for ourselves. Bakhtin, however, is not wedded to images of sight. He also uses the sense of touch: “It is only the other who can be embraced,” he says. “It is only the other’s boundaries that can all be touched and felt lovingly. . . . Only the other’s lips can be touched with our own.”18 He augments the beneficent gaze and the loving embrace with the image of a singer in a chorus: “I embody myself in the voice of the other who sings of me. . . . The voice can sing only in a warm atmosphere, only in the atmosphere of possible choral support, where solitariness of sound is in principle excluded.”19 To these three images, Bakhtin adds those of rhythm and dance: “Rhythm is an embrace and kiss bestowed upon the . . . ‘bodied’ time of another’s mortal life; . . . In dancing I become ‘bodied’ in being to the highest degree; I come to participate in the being of others.”20 In his middle essays, when Bakhtin turns his focus from the self and others to issues of language and literature, he still retains this emphasis on the irreducible community of two: There are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents . . . Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated— overpopulated—with the intentions of others.21

All these images—sight, touch, song, rhythm, dance, and words—gesture toward one conclusion: the self without others is not only lonely but bereft, silent, without language. No less than half of my words are the words of someone else, whether I recognize that to be the case or not. However, how do I engage these words that are so richly textured and tethered to both things and other people? Through a process that Bakhtin calls dialogism. The root of this word, of course, is dialogue, but Bakhtin means something more than simply two people talking to each other. He refers to a complex interrelationship of words, people, things, and analysis. Bakhtin uses such concepts as the irreducible community of two and dialogism to deny that language can be understood as a linear system or that it can be understood apart from other people, but he also recognizes the flexibility of language and its power for individual, creative expression. It is, in fact, this flexibility and creativity of language that allows us to think new thoughts, to understand and explain new situations, to translate from one language to another—indeed to live as image bearers of God. If we think for a moment about the first three chapters of Genesis, we can see that it is the flexibility of language that enables humans to name the animals, to write

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love poems—“Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”—and to engage the serpent in the conversation that inaugurates the Fall. Bakhtin suggests that we find our way in the world and in words through our interactions with two kinds of language: he calls them authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse, says Bakhtin, is a binding word that “demands our unconditional allegiance.”22 He identifies it as the word of fathers, adults, and teachers. It comes to us as a single, undigested lump; we can either swallow it whole or spit it out, but we cannot assimilate it piecemeal. We might say, then, that authoritative discourse is composed of words that come at us. In contrast, internally persuasive discourse consists of words that come to us. As with authoritative discourse, it is composed of alien words that are at first strange and perhaps even frightening. As we take these words into our own mouths, however, as we frame them, speak them, and modify them, we affirm them through assimilation and tightly interweave them with our own words. The words that once belonged to someone else awaken new words and new thoughts in us and create the capacity for further ideas that remain full of possibility.23 Authoritative discourse, to put it another way, is composed of words that we recite from memory, words, that, if written, would be enclosed in quotation marks. They are words that remain external to us. But internally persuasive discourse is composed of language we “retell in our own words.” In that retelling, we do not invent language, but we do make it our own in the way we frame, modify, and reflect it. For instance, when Humpty Dumpty recites from memory “In winter, when the fields are white/I sing this song for your delight” he is engaged in authoritative discourse.24 When he dismisses all the connotations and denotations of glory and arrogantly announces that it means “a nice knock-down argument,” just because that is what he chooses it to mean, he is also engaging in authoritative discourse. In the first instance, he simply accepts and recites a poem without engaging or modifying it. In the second instance, he simply rejects all that tethers glory to things or to other people. He spits the word out. When Alice engages Humpty Dumpty in conversation about the word glory, when she takes his definition into her mouth, reworks it, questions it, and reframes it, when she asks “whether you can make words mean so many different things,” she participates in internally persuasive discourse, the kind of language that helps her see more of the world around her, even if it appears in upside-down ways. Internally persuasive discourse is a kind of testimony to the dynamic and dialogic power of language. The word testimony links us to a voice Bakhtin incorporates into his own writings, that of the fourth-century African thinker Augustine of Hippo. Augustine makes a distinction between reciting and testifying that parallels Bakhtin’s notion of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.

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To recite, for Augustine, is merely to rehearse with your tongue something you have heard and perhaps understood superficially. It is to repeat an authoritative discourse. To testify, or to speak an internally persuasive discourse, however, is, in Augustine’s words, “to speak out what the heart holds true. If the tongue and the heart are at odds, you are reciting, not testifying.”25 Testifying requires that you take another’s words into your mouth, chew them, digest them, and make them your own so that what the tongue says and the heart conceives are one and the same. With the notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, reciting, and testifying, we are a long way from language conceived as an abstract system composed of signifiers and signifieds or endlessly deferring and differing signifiers. We might better think of words as rotating in a centrifuge: they come to us from other people; they come laden with meaning, attached to things; but they also come with the potential to create new meanings. They come already spinning with centrifugal force. Yet, at the same time, we deeply and intuitively know that language communicates—that it tethers us not only to the world but also to other people. Language is not, after all, an abstract system of disembodied words but the response of one person to another: Alice to Humpty Dumpty; Bakhtin to Saussure; I to you in this chapter; it is not words that communicate, but we who communicate in interactions that require, as a minimum, the irreducible community of two. The minimum, however, for Bakhtin is not enough. The call/response of meaningful language characterizes not only our relationships to other persons, but also our relationship to the infinite person, to God. In response to a colleague who argued that the “God hypothesis” short-circuited rigorous thinking, Bakhtin put it this way: Revelation characterizes the world just as much as natural laws do . . . [and is characterized] by the Person who wants to reveal Himself. . . . [A] personal relationship to a personal God—that is the distinguishing feature of religion, but that is also what constitutes the special difficulty of religion, owing to which there may arise a distinctive fear of religion and of Revelation, a fear of the personal orientation. . . . This is not a refusal to accept Revelation but a typical fear of Revelation. Cf. the people who are afraid of accepting a favor, afraid of becoming obligated; what we are dealing with here is precisely the fear of receiving a gift, and thereby obligating oneself too much.26

Bakhtin’s perception that people in general, and academics in particular, reject the notion of revelation not because it is untrue but because, if true, it puts them under obligation to a personal God, is shrewdly perceptive and may help to explain the steady recourse to abstract systems throughout the modernist period. If the world is structured not as an impersonal system, but through a personal call, through revelation, then the appropriate response is—well, a response. Communication, call/response, dialogic

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interchange, is inscribed into the very structure of the world. To return to the visual image, God is the one who looks on me, who sees me in a threedimensional environment, who offers me the gift of meaning. Bakhtin puts it this way, “What I must be for the other, God is for me.”27 That is, what I should be for others—one who helps to create meaning by offering my excess of vision to another—God already is for me, whether or not I recognize this to be the case. It is not simply that God’s beneficent, and therefore productive, gaze provides a model for the meaningful encounters I should seek to create, although Bakhtin does speak in this way. It is also that God’s creation of, and revelation in, the world guarantees the possibility of meaning. The personal noun is important here, for, in speaking of God, Bakhtin rejects abstract language. God is not a concept, an absolute principle, an inert authoritative dogma. God is a person—the infinite person, the person who in his wholeness can guarantee a complex, thick, three-dimensional environment that will sustain a plenitude of meanings for an entire world. Because he is a person, the divine person, he also initiates the call/response of meaningful language. It is Bakhtin’s thick view of language—tethered to the world, to other people, and to God, yet full of centrifugal energy—that points us in the direction of perspectival realism, a conjunction of terms that may suggest an oxymoron at best if not a flat-out contradiction.28 Realism advances the claim that there is a definite “something” that lies outside our own perception. Perspectival, on the other hand, turns our attention to our own particularities and the roles played by our biases, traditions, genders, and the like. Giving full weight to the term realism means recognizing a world that exists outside our own constructions and impinges upon us and sets limits to our ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world. Such realism is metaphysical (there is a real world), epistemological (we can know the world, not just the representations of our own minds), and ethical (there are rights and wrongs as well as moral consequences). Our understandings of the world—metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically—are, however, always necessarily local and particular. We are each of us limited by what we can see and by our own horizons. We cannot, in principle, know or describe the world either universally or exhaustively—we cannot have a view from nowhere—and so we are, inevitably, perspectivalists both spatially and temporally. Spatially, how we see the world is determined in part from the place where we stand. For instance, I look at my house from the curb or floating above it in a balloon, as its owner or as its prospective seller. Temporally, the world itself seems in flux and in need of a continuing interpretive discourse: a Ptolemaic description of the universe may seem inadequate next to a quantum mechanical one. Yet, each perspective is whole in and of itself: it is not a pixel that can be added to other pixels in order to

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produce a complete picture. Rather, each perspective is complete in itself, although it remains inevitably a partial picture. Combining the perspectives results in a kaleidoscopic plenitude, not a larger singular viewpoint. If I were a philosopher rather than an English professor, I might start talking here about the two key concepts in modernist theories of knowing: the notion of representational epistemology and the correspondence view of truth.29 In representational epistemology, the objects of our awareness are appearances and concepts, not the world itself. If we link representational epistemology to a correspondence theory of truth, then we believe that in some way these appearances and concepts resemble the world, which we know (tautologically) only as it is reflected in appearances and concepts. Representational epistemology and a correspondence view of truth lead to a modernist view of realism—that we do, or at least potentially can, know what the world is really like. The problem, of course, is that we have no way to check on the validity of the resemblance between the appearances and concepts and the world itself, and so no way to know whether or not we actually are perceiving the world as it really is. Most postmodern thinkers, consequently, question the whole concept of a correspondence view of truth, although they retain the structure of representational epistemology. That is, they deny that ideas or language are tethered to the world, to other people, or to God; ideas and language are only linked to appearances and can only be accessed within systems. Because we cannot know the world apart from our perceptions and concepts, they say, all we can know is the content of our own minds, our perspectives, our system of language—not the world as it really is. Because we do not have access to the world or to other people or to God, nor do we have any way to validate the contents of our minds, we cannot claim to have true knowledge about anything. Not only should we be skeptical about whether our concepts actually match up with the world, we cannot in any meaningful way talk about concepts themselves: signifieds have themselves been dissolved into signifiers that defer and differ within an abstract system of language. What perspectival realism does is to reconfigure this whole interrelated set of questions. It retains a correspondence view of truth—that the world is a certain way regardless of our thinking about it—but it substitutes a realist epistemology (that the world is the object of our awareness) for a representational epistemology (that appearances and concepts are the objects of our awareness). It also gives up the modernist goal of exhaustive knowledge (that to have truth we must be able to map out the isomorphic relationship of our perceptions to reality) for the promise of genuine knowledge (that our various perceptions do give us access to a real world). In a realist epistemology, appearances and concepts are not the objects of our awareness but the means by which we become aware of the world. Appearances

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and concepts do not need to resemble the world in some sort of transparent relationship. Rather, they are tools or means by which we respond to a world that presents itself to us as a set of thick, multilayered experiences. Language, then, is seen not as an end in itself but as one of the media, or means, by which we respond to and act in the world. For Bakthin, the word always reaches out beyond itself. What do I hear when another speaks? How do I take his words into my mouth? How do I cite and frame her speech to make it both mine and hers? How do these words swirl about the objects to which they are directed? The messy, ambiguous, inaccurate, penetrating chaos of real words as they circulate in the world, not an abstract system of langue, constitutes the very stuff of language, and language includes not just words but gestures, intonation, eye contact, the pitch and timbre of my voice. Language is perspectival because our words are embedded—embodied—in particular persons, particular traditions, particular dialects, and particular times. This embodiedness is not accidental but essential to the nature of language. Yet, language, which is inherently perspectival, is also a means of describing reality because it emerges out of and returns to a common world we share: as soon as we write the least noun, the whole world pours onto the page. A perspectival realist view of language takes the world as its object, not just its own signifiers and signifieds. Bakhtin’s emphasis on the referential or realist, yet perspectival, nature of language removes an impossible burden of proof from both epistemology and language. We are not confined to the representations of our own minds nor do we claim that our perspectives isomorphically map out a completely accurate picture of the world. A single description, a universal meaning, a view-from-nowhere, is precisely what language can never afford us because language itself is dialogic, embedded in the material world and in particular people, in the irreducible community of two. Nevertheless, we do encounter bits of the world as it really is, through our words and ideas. As philosopher Lee Hardy puts it, I see a rectangular book, even though all of its shape appearances, save the one given along a line orthogonal to its surface, are variations on the trapezoid. As a skilled and competent perceiver, I move through the multiplicity of its shape appearances to perceive its shape, the one I take it to enjoy independently of its appearances to perceivers such as me—the one, in fact, that in large part accounts for why it appears to me the way it does. The appearances by which I perceive the book are clearly relative to my perception (even if they are not wholly relative to it). The precise dimensions and angles of the apparent figure are strictly dependent upon the book’s relation to the standpoint from which I perceive it. But the spatial properties of the book I perceive are not dependent upon its relation to my perception of them. The book itself is rectangular.30

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That we can talk in true ways about books and the world, about each other and God, and that we can talk to each other and to God is important not just for theories of language but also for actual living. While it may not matter in Wonderland whether glory means “a knock-down argument” or not, it does matter when we want to communicate in this real world, and how we talk with each other affects the way we live with each other. For Bakhtin, a truly ethical act, like a genuine word, is not an element within an abstract system. It is an act of faithfulness that recognizes its tethers to the material world, to others, and to God, a particular act for which I take responsibility and to which I sign my name. Derrida, too, conceives of ethics as a particular act that requires a signature. For Derrida, however, the ethical act takes place in a moment of madness, when among the oscillating binary oppositions, the deferring and differing signifiers, I make a strategic wager, take a risk, invent a decision.31 It is too much to hope that I will act wisely and well; I can only try to “betray as little as possible.”32 The primary ethical action for Bakhtin, however, is not snatching a position from oscillating binary oppositions but faithfulness to or being-true-to a person, “the way,” says Bakhtin, faithfulness “is used in reference to love and marriage.”33 In other words, I do this act, say this word, not in a “moment of madness,” but because I choose to be faithful—to God, to others, to myself. Additionally, I know the content of that faithful action (what I ought to do) insofar as I have come to know and be known by the words and the person of the divine and the human other. In ethics, then, as in language and epistemology, Bakhtin’s perspectival realism reminds us that we are responsible to shape our actions, our words, and our knowing, but we do so within the thick bonds created by our tethers to the world, to others, and to God. All of these constantly intrude upon us, disallowing arrogantly solipsistic or radically skeptical theories of meaning. It is comforting to know that glory does not mean “a nice knock-down argument,” but understanding this is only to begin the task of discovering what even a single word does and can mean. As one of my students once remarked, “Language is simple until you start to think about it. Then it becomes an inexplicable mystery. Each time something we say clicks with someone else, we should be overwhelmed with the wonder the miraculous deserves.” Indeed we should.

NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193. 2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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3. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, corrected ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 4. Jonathan Culler, “Literary Competence,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 928. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 71. 6. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 292; author’s emphasis. 7. M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 56–62. 8. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 8. 9. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 276–77. 10. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 278. 11. The word tether is my simplified image for Bakhtin’s complex and nuanced account of the relationship of words to things, other people, and God. 12. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 10, 12; emphasis in the original. 13. Derrida, “Différance,” 17. 14. Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 50. 15. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 339. 16. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293–94. 17. M. M. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 24–25. 18. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 41. 19. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 170, author’s emphasis. 20. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 120, 137. 21. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293–94. 22. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 343. 23. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 346. 24. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 217. 25. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26.2, trans. Garry Wills, in Saint Augustine’s Childhood: Confessions Book One (New York: Viking, 2001), 14. 26. “M. M. Bakhtin’s Lectures and Comments of 1924–1925,” in Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 219–20; author’s emphasis. 27. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 56. 28. The translators of Bakhtin do not use the term perspectival realism, but throughout his writings, Bakhtin points us to world and word as “something given” (realism) and “something-to-be-achieved” (perspectivalism); see Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 30. 29. This discussion of epistemology is indebted to conversations with my colleague Lee Hardy.

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30. Lee Hardy, “Postmodernism as a Kind of Modernism: Nietzsche’s Critique of Knowledge,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 35. 31. Jacques Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking” in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 361. 32. Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking,” 360. 33. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 37.

2 Can We Be Good without God? John Hare

If our title is taken to mean, can we be good without believing in God, the answer is yes. In fact, there are people who do not believe in God whose lives put the lives of many believers to shame, but that is not really all there is to say. Here is the thesis of this chapter: morality, as we are familiar with it in our culture, originally made sense against the background of a set of beliefs and practices in traditional theism. In elite Western culture, these beliefs and practices have now been widely abandoned. The result is that morality no longer makes sense within that culture the way it once did. I will mention Immanuel Kant, though this chapter is not about Kant, as such, because I think he is the most important philosopher of the modern age. He put the point this way, that morality without belief in God is possible but is rationally unstable.1 That is the position I want to discuss. There are two problem areas in particular that I will stress. The first is the gap between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to meet it. This gap produces the question, Can we be morally good? The second problem area is the source of the authority of morality. This produces the question, Why should we be morally good? One traditional answer to these questions has been that God enables us to live in the way we should, and that we should live that way because God tells us to live that way. I will be looking at various kinds of incoherence that arise if this traditional answer is no longer available. What I call “the moral gap” is the gap between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to live by it.2 One central feature of the moral demand is the requirement of impartial benevolence—wanting good for everybody. This is not the whole of morality, but it will be the focus here. I will give two formulations of this requirement taken from Kant. When a 31

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person proposes an action to herself, she does it with some account to herself of the reason why she should do it. The first formulation of the moral demand gives her a test: if her action is going to be morally permissible, she has to be willing to propose that anyone in her kind of situation should do that kind of action for that kind of reason. That would turn her proposal into a universal law for what should be done in such circumstances.3 An example might make this clearer. Suppose she is a college professor and she has a huge stack of student papers to grade. Suppose she hates grading papers, and she hates the winter, and the thought occurs to her that she could leave the papers and fly to the Bahamas for a few days and soak in the sun. Then when she gets home, she could take the whole pile of papers up to the top of the stairs and throw them down, and any paper that gets on the bottom step would get an A, and on the next step an A- and on the next step a B+, and so on. She could save herself hours and hours of time and have a lovely weekend. Now the question is whether this action together with this motivation is morally permissible. The moral answer is no because she will find that she cannot will that anyone in such a situation should act like that. Suppose she is not the professor, but one of the students, perhaps one of the students whose admission to medical school is in the balance, depending on his cumulative average, and who has just put hours and hours into this paper as a result. Can she will for this situation that the professor grade the papers in this haphazard way? She cannot. This test has the result that any reference to any particular person, including herself, is eliminated. If she is willing the action for anyone in a certain kind of situation, she cannot preserve reference to herself or any other individual. She has to will that the same action should be done if the particular people in her particular situation were to reverse their roles, if she were to become the student and the student were to become the professor. The principle is thus a version of the golden rule, which we should do to others only what we wish they should do to us,4 the principle that we should love the neighbor as the self.5 So this is the first formulation of the moral demand. The second formulation is that we should treat humanity, whether in ourselves or anyone else, as an end and never merely as a means.6 To treat another person as an end in herself is to share her goals and purposes as far as the moral law allows.7 This does not mean that I am forbidden to use another person for my purposes as a reader of this chapter is using me for enlightenment or entertainment. Morality says that I am forbidden to use another person merely for my purposes. For example, you are at a restaurant and the waitress brings you your food. Do you think of her merely as a conveyer belt on legs to get the food from the kitchen to your table? Do you consider that she, too, is a person with goals and purposes of her own? Perhaps you are tired and have had a long day, but you consider that she, too, may be tired and she may

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have had a long day facing grouchy people like you. To treat her as an end is to share her purposes, that is, to make her purposes your purposes as far as the moral law allows. She wants a friendly face, though not too friendly. Is there something morally wrong about this? No. You should want to give it to her. Note that you have to treat humanity this way also in your own person. Morality does not say that you treat yourself as a doormat, a mere means to supply other people’s preferences. You also have to respect yourself as having the same worth (but morally no greater worth) than any other human being. To show why these two formulations of the supreme principle of morality are so demanding, I will describe two cases. First, you are considering going to a movie for nine dollars, and it occurs to you that nine dollars could keep someone alive for a week in, say, Zambia.8 One may doubt this, but there are actually a billion people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day. I lived and worked as a teacher in India for about a year, and my salary was the equivalent of about a dollar a day. My daughter Catherine worked in Zambia, where the per capita income is $380 a year. Moreover, the rate of adult HIV infection is very high and that country is full of orphans whose extended family cannot feed their own children, let alone others. Now is the purpose of staying alive for a week morally permissible? Yes. You should share that person’s purpose. Then, which is more important, the movie or the life? If you did not know which role you were going to play in this situation, the starving child or the filmgoer, which would you choose? In Christian terms, we could put it this way: Christ says about feeding the hungry, “in as far as you do it to the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me.”9 Thus, which is more important to Christ, the movie or the life? The second case is that morality, in the shape I have described it, requires that we love our enemies. Every human whom we affect by our actions counts as worth the same and we have to make their ends our ends as far as we can. We do not have to share their immoral ends, if for example, their purpose is to do us harm. Their purposes to continue living themselves, to have their dignity respected, to have flourishing communities and personal relations, to have worthwhile achievements and lives full of beauty and truth, all count morally just as much as our own. Now, how natural is this kind of love? When I think back over the years since 9/11, people in America have experienced a more vivid sense of who their enemies are. I have seen in many people what started from a sense of justice outraged but slipped almost immediately into hatred or revenge. This is natural. The common sense on this matter is what Socrates first encountered in Athens when he asked, “What is Justice?” in the Republic. The answer was justice is doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.10 This is natural, given our fallen nature, but it is not what love requires.

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The moral demand is the first part of the structure of the moral gap. The second part is our natural capacities, those we were born with, and those capacities are not adequate to the demand. What I am presenting here is a version of the traditional doctrine of original sin, which is still to be found in Kant. His version goes back into the history of the pietist Lutheranism in which he grew up. It comes to Luther through Ockham and Scotus and behind Scotus, Anselm, and behind Anselm, Augustine.11 The way Duns Scotus puts it is that there are two basic affections of the will if you like two pulls. There is the pull toward one’s own advantage and the pull toward what is good in itself, independently of our happiness.12 We humans are born with, and will always experience both affections, even in heaven. The key moral question, though, is which we put first. For example, as I gave the lecture that became this chapter, I could have been thinking first of the material and my audience. I could be thinking first of myself and my anxieties or satisfactions. I am in fact thinking of both, and there is nothing wrong with this; but the key question is the ranking. When I am doing public presentations, my prayer beforehand is always that I focus less on myself and more on my subject matter and my audience. Do we put the good in itself first and do what will make us happy only if it is consistent with this? Conversely, do we put happiness first and do what is good in itself only to the extent that it will make us happy? To think this second way is to be under the evil principle that subordinates duty to happiness. We are all born this way. Here, I think that Plato and Aristotle were right. What is natural to us is to pursue our own happiness. This means we cannot be impartially benevolent, for we put ourselves first. This also means that we cannot make ourselves impartial, for the evil principle is our root principle, and, if the root is corrupt it cannot mend itself. My experience in talking about this view to people is that some of them think it is too pessimistic. They think, for example, that we are born basically good, and we do such horrible things to each other mostly because we do not understand what we are doing. People, however, can know perfectly well how much they are hurting each other, and do it anyway. My wife used to volunteer at recess in an elementary school. She noticed that these children, who had been together for several years, had established a pecking order, like chickens in a coop; and those at the bottom of this hierarchy were bullied into a state of misery that, she thought, might leave serious psychological damage. My point is that the kids doing this damage knew precisely how to torment those beneath them. Consider, for example, a dysfunctional marriage in which the two partners have refined to an art form the techniques of wounding each other. In a perverse way, it is their ability to torment each other that keeps them together. Even if we discount what one might think are extreme cases, let us think again about the movie. There are some initial responses to this dilemma.13

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Movies are an art form, and art has its own deep value. Suppose, however, that it is Terminator 5? I need some relaxation, I might say, otherwise I will grow weary with well-doing, and burn out, but am I really on the verge of burnout when I go? Alternatively, what about a walk in the woods? I need to spend time with my family, I may say, and indeed I think I can justify spending more resources on my own children, but is the movie really the best way to spend time with them? I think that after we have given all these sorts of reasons, we will realize that there is something unjust about the way we are spending our money. This applies not just to the movie but to the CD player, the new couch, and the down jacket. Impartial benevolence turns out to make a demand on us that we limit our standard of living. I happen to think the demand is too high for us by our natural capacities. I find myself switching off when the pictures of starving children come on because I just cannot face it. Moreover our culture is full of devices to weaken any inclination we originally had. The retailers in the mall and the advertisers do not want us to think about justice while we are shopping. In West Michigan, where I used to teach, the largest mall decided not to allow the Salvation Army to collect in their traditional way at Christmastime. These two features of the gap picture, namely the demand and our defective capacities, are present in Kant and have been repeated by most of the theorists of morality who followed Kant. A remarkable fact is that they have also repeated a third feature. They construct the picture of a person who is without our limitations of information and good will, and who tells us how to live. This imaginary being is given many different names and descriptions: an ideal observer, an archangel, and ourselves behind the veil of ignorance.14 What is typical of all these imaginary beings, however, is that they are without the usual human limitations. This pattern needs explanation. Why should morality be presented as having this shape rather than what we might otherwise have expected—a purely human institution—tied to our human conditions of limitation? I think the overwhelmingly plausible answer is that these imaginary beings are a remnant, a relic. They are the remains of a traditional view, according to which human beings are subordinate to a divine being who is without our limitations and whose prescriptions about our lives we are supposed to obey. I do not want to limit the picture of the moral gap to Christianity, or even to the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There is already in Aristotle the description of a gap-shaped morality. The best life, he tells us, would be superior to the human level, but we ought not to follow the proverb writers, and “think human, since (we) are human, or think mortal, since (we) are mortal.”15 Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be immortal, that is, like the immortal gods. The gap picture goes beyond Western culture. When I was teaching very briefly in China, I went to visit the monastery where Chu Hsi, a neo-Confucian of the twelfth

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century, lived and taught. He held that for most of us our good nature is like a pearl lying in muddy water, which means that we cannot see through to the right principles whose source is heaven. The description of life in this moral gap, without anything added to it, is incoherent because of another feature of morality that can be expressed succinctly as the view that ought implies can. The best way to put this is that the question whether you ought to do something does not arise unless you can do it. To see the appeal of this principle, consider this example. When I was working for the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, I took my infant daughter with me to visit the congressman who was head of the committee. She was too young to control her bladder, and had an accident that left a mark on the congressman’s blue carpet. Now, if I blamed her for this, it would not merely be stupid, it would go against the whole point of blaming. It is a cardinal principle of childrearing that you should only hold children accountable to standards that they are able to reach. Another way to put that is to say that ought implies can. Then if our capacities are really inadequate to the moral demand, is it not the case that we ought to live by it? It is incoherent to put us under a demand we cannot reach. Yet, surely we are under the moral demand. How are we to explain this paradox? Christianity has a particular reading of the gap picture of morality to help with this difficulty. The gap picture has three components; first, the demand; second, our capacities; and third, the person without our limitations. What Christianity adds is that the third part of this picture (the person without our limitations, namely God) intervenes in human affairs so as to change the second part of this picture (namely our capacities) so that they become adequate to the first part of the picture (namely the moral demand). Just how God is supposed to do this is another topic. My point here is not to describe God’s assistance but to show the place for it in morality. This feature of Christianity about God’s assistance has dropped out of the professional literature in moral theory. This means that contemporary moral philosophy is faced with the threat of the incoherence I have just described, namely the incoherence of holding us accountable to a standard we are unable to meet. Contemporary moral philosophers have responded to this threat in essentially three ways. First, there are philosophers who exaggerate our initial capacity so that it becomes adequate to the demand, which is held constant as impartial benevolence.16 Some theorists hold that if we were only vividly aware of the effects of our actions on other people, we would tend to do what morality requires. It is thus ignorance that holds us back, they say, not any radical evil of the will. Then, how is it that people who know perfectly well how much they are harming others nevertheless persist in the most horrifying contempt and cruelty? It is interesting to compare the beginning of the twenty-first century with the beginning of the twentieth. Around the last

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turn of the century, there was enormous confidence that the new century was going to be one of moral progress through education and technological advance. I have noticed some of the same rhetoric around the turn of the new century. In between has come the bloodiest and most brutal century in human history. The Germans who killed the Jews and others in the camps of the Second World War had their victims perform Bach’s sacred music for them before putting them in the gas chambers. Education and technology made evil worse. The humanist manifesto published just before the Second World War said, “Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”17 The question I am asking is whether this is true and whether it is supported by our experience of the world run by the people who believed it. The second strategy for dealing with the moral gap without God is to hold our natural capacities constant as biased toward the self and then adjust the demand downward in order to meet them.18 Some moral theorists diminish the moral demand by saying that we are not, after all, required to be impartially benevolent, and our moral obligations are just to particular people who are embedded within the special relations we have to them as friends and family and members of our community. We do not, for example, have moral obligations to starving children in Africa because they are not related to us in the right way. We do not even know their names. This makes the moral demand much closer to our natural tendency to restrict our care to those close to us. One example is the kind of evolutionary ethics that decides what humans generally desire by looking at their evolutionary history, most of which was hunting and gathering. If contemporary hunter-gatherer societies do not show signs of impartial benevolence or of loving the enemy, this kind of evolutionary ethics dismisses these sorts of demands as utopian. We are not, so to speak, programmed for such a life. On this strategy, what is good is what fits our natural capacities, and our natural capacities are given us by evolution for the reproductive advantage of our genes. The third strategy is to hold both the demand and our capacities constant, and then to try to find some substitute for divine assistance in bridging the resultant gap. Perhaps, as for Rousseau, love of the country will change our capacities. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it is the withering away of the state and ownership by the working class of the means of production as Marx thought. To discuss this strategy carefully requires going through these alternatives one by one and examining whether they work. I am not optimistic that they do. We need to go on to the second problem area distinguished at the beginning. The first was the picture of the moral gap. The second is the source of the authority of morality. We can ask the question, Why should I be moral?

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This is not the question, What do I get out of being moral? but the question, Why should I accept the moral demand as a demand upon me that is independent of my happiness? Why should I not go down to the Bahamas and neglect the grading? Why should I do my duty? I will call this question “the normative question.”19 To put it another way, Why is morality trumps? I am going to look at various answers that contemporary moral philosophy has given to this question, none of which say that morality is binding on us because God has commanded it or called us to it. My sense is that none of these alternative answers is satisfactory, and I am going to mention a difficulty or two with each of them. This, however, is just the beginning of what would be a long discussion of each one. What follows if none of these nontheist answers works? We should expect to find that if there is no generally accepted answer to the question, Why should I be moral? the perceived authority of morality in the culture will start to weaken. This is what Nietzsche already foresaw at the end of the nineteenth century. He foresaw what he called the death of God, and he foresaw and looked forward to the death of guilt along with the death of God.20 Guilt, considered subjectively, is what we feel when we violate the moral law. If we lose the sense of the authority of the moral law, then we will lose this kind of feeling of subjective guilt along with it. Contemporary moral philosophy has tried various answers to the normative question without bringing God into it. One is that reason demands that I be moral. We might try tying the nature of reason to willing universal law, which is the first formulation of the moral demand I gave you from Kant. The problem is that there are universal laws that eliminate reference to any individual but that would be immoral to will. Consider the principle that all Jewish people should be killed. There is a true story about a fanatical Nazi who discovered that he had a Jewish grandmother, which was the degree of connection the regime had established as sufficient for deportation to the death camps. True to his principles, the Nazi handed himself in. He did not make any special exemption for himself, but surely this is not enough to make his principle morally permissible. Suppose a terrorist thinks that it is good to free the world of as many infidels as possible. He may be able to eliminate reference to any individuals in this principle and thus pass the logical test of universality. This does not make his principle morally permissible, however. There are problems with making reason the source of the authority of morality.21 Another answer we might propose is that the source of the moral obligation is the community we belong to. We might say that we have grown up in communities that respect the moral law, and our identities are at least in part formed by those communities. Socrates says that Athens is like a parent; it has made him the person he is.22 Perhaps to be true to our social identity, therefore, we have to acknowledge the authority of the moral de-

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mand that our community instilled into us. I grew up in a community that was socially stratified by class. My nanny told me that gentlemen polished the backs of their shoes; ordinary people polish the fronts, but only gentlemen the backs. I remember at boarding school being beaten with a shoe by a prefect in the dormitory for having come down to breakfast with my hair unbrushed. He was trying to mold me into a gentleman. There were some good features of the code of being a gentleman, but they were tied up with inherited privilege in a way that I now think is wrong. It does not follow from the fact that I grew up a certain way that I am obliged to continue that way. The community does not have that sort of authority. If it did, then everyone would be obliged to the standards they grew up with, and that would be normative relativism. In addition, if we make community the source of the authority of morality, we will get exclusivity. We will start to think of our obligations as limited to those we have special relations with. We will stop seeing or caring about the effects of our choices of lifestyle and public policy on the rest of the world. The contemporary world displays a curious mixture of increased globalization on the one hand and increasingly aggressive tribal loyalty on the other. We need a sense of moral obligation that transcends the community, a sense of the dignity of a human being as such, even of an enemy. A third possibility is that nature grounds the authority of morality. Some theorists think that you can deduce normative conclusions about how we ought to live from factual premises about what kind of people we are and what we are naturally inclined toward.23 Here, we need to go back to the point I made earlier about our natural capacities. I suggested that the philosophers Plato and Aristotle had it right—we naturally pursue our own happiness. As Duns Scotus put it, we rank the affection for advantage above the affection for justice. We could construct a more cheerful picture, by which our nature is fundamentally good and then deduce morality from this nature. Then, however, we will have built the conclusion into the premises. I have spent some time writing about evolutionary ethics, which is the attempt to find a basis for ethics in the nature we share with other animals.24 I have found kin selection, by which insects in some species refrain from reproduction because their genes get a better chance of replication in the next generation if they perform a more specialized function. I have found what is misleadingly called reciprocal altruism, which is a kind of tit for tat. I have found various forms of social control where discipline is exercises on some members of a group for the sake of the group. I have not found the Good Samaritan, the love of the enemy. This still needs to be explained. Nature in the sense of what we share with other animals does not give us a basis for this kind of morality. Finally, we might say that it is simply self-evident that morality is authoritative, and so this authority does not need a ground at all, either in God or

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in anything else.25 Morality might be like sense perception in this way. It is self-evident, when I see a goldfinch outside my window in good light, that I am justified in believing that there is a goldfinch there. This is not to say my perception is infallible. I might be the victim of a practical joke by a neighbor who knows that I am a philosopher who argues for the basic reliability of sense perception and who has constructed a holograph projecting a picture of a goldfinch onto the tree outside my window. Nevertheless, in the absence of some such special condition, I should believe that my senses are giving me the truth. Perceptual beliefs such as this are properly basic. If everything had to be justified, then it would turn out that nothing could be. We do have to start somewhere, and perception seems to be one good place. The problem is that the authority of moral sense seems different from the authority of sense perception. Our moral sensors have been distorted more than our sense perception because the moral sensors are closer to the will that is where the self-preference and so the distortion resides. Additionally, I do not have the experience of waking up in the morning and just not trusting my senses. I can imagine having such an experience; suppose I am a habitual user of hallucinogens for example, or I am waking up after a general anesthetic. In the absence of such special conditions, I just go ahead and trust. I do, however, have the experience of moral apathy or listlessness, of simply not feeling the authority of the moral demand. I know my duty, but I turn over and go back to sleep. This is no doubt a sign of a weak character, but it is not abnormal in the way it is abnormal to distrust the authority of the senses. The authority of moral perception is self-evident only when our wills are correctly ordered, but, in fact, they are regularly disordered. I have described the four main alternative secular answers to the normative question, Why should I be moral? All of them need a supplement to tell us which demands of reason, which community, and which nature, which moral perceptions we should trust. Christianity has an answer to the normative question that is different from any of the above. It says that I should be moral because God tells me to be so. For example, John Calvin says, “God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness, that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous.”26 Morality has authority because it is the route that God has chosen for us toward our ultimate end, which is some form of union with God. I will now summarize what I hope to have accomplished here. I have focused on two questions, which an account of morality needs to answer. The first question is, Can we be good? and if the answer to this is yes, we can go on to the second question, which is, Why should we be good? My claim has been that morality does not make sense without answers to these questions and that the main contemporary nontheist answers fail. I gave three types of nontheist answers to the first question, and four to the second. If I am right about these failures, this does not prove that the theist answers

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are correct, and it does not show that only theists can be morally good. There are many forms of life that people can practice without being able to make sense of them. However, having answers to these two questions is an advantage, and without answers I think the authority of morality will tend to decline. Those who want to hold onto morality, but without God, will have to find a substitute to do the same work, and it is not going to be easy to find such a substitute. If they do not, their morality will remain, as Kant put it, rationally unstable.

NOTES 1. Volckmann’s Notes to Kant’s Lectures on Natural Theology, NT, 1151. See also, Kant, Critique of Judgment, KU, 5:452. 2. John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 3. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:402. 4. Matthew 7:12. 5. Mark 12:31. 6. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429. 7. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:430. 8. There are premises for this argument that I have not stated; for example, we are to be held accountable for omissions as well as commissions. Also, the particular figures given in the example were written at the time of the composition of the lecture and may not be accurate any longer. 9. Matthew 25:40. 10. Plato, Republic, 332b. 11. This history is given in somewhat more detail in John E. Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). 12. Ordinatio 2, dist. 6, q. 2. 13. I have described the responses more fully in Ethics and International Affairs (London: Macmillan, 1982), 163–83. 14. Richard Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959); R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). 15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7.1177b32–33. 16. This is typical of utilitarianism, for example, John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979). 17. “A Humanist Manifesto,” The New Humanist 6, no. 3 (1933). 18. Examples would be Nel Noddings, Caring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 19. The name is from Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. 20. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 90–91.

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21. Kant does not himself make the argument this way. One of the problems is in formulating an account of reason where moral commitment is neither built into its definition nor invalidly inferred from it. 22. Plato, Crito, 50d. 23. Deductivist natural law theories are of this type. It is controversial whether Thomas Aquinas was himself a deductivist, but some neo-Thomists have been, for example, Henry Veatch, Swimming against the Current in Contemporary Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990). 24. John E. Hare, “Is There an Evolutionary Foundation for Human Morality?” in Evolution and Ethics, ed. Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 187–203. 25. For example, see G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 26. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.22.2.

II QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING SCIENCE

3 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? David A. Van Baak

It is perfectly natural to all of us born in the twentieth century to draw conclusions about the character of the natural world from the picture we have formed of it through the methods of science. In our time, the tools of myth, history, poetry, philosophy, and theology, which formerly bore the role of providing portraits of the material world, have been largely supplanted by science in this respect. From this, what conclusions do we typically draw from the sciences, about the character of the physical universe? Here are the two conclusions perhaps most familiar to us: first, that the universe is almost unimaginably large and old; second, that the matter in the universe behaves mechanically, in the same sense (and for the same reasons) as do the parts of a machine. This essay does not address the size or age of the universe but instead takes up the second of these points. I will try, from my standpoint as a teaching physicist, to show what I mean by a mechanical picture of the universe. I will give a glimpse of a competing nonmechanical view of the universe and the process by which it was supplanted. That part of the story might be familiar, but I intend to show that there remains, even today, another viewpoint, wholly within mainstream physics, that is by contrast decidedly nonmechanical in character. I conclude by showing why it does not lie with the power of physical science to establish which of these two competing pictures gives a truer depiction of the deep nature of the world. To show the character of the now-prevalent view of the world as a mechanism, I want to introduce an early expression of an alternative viewpoint. It is a view about the natural world’s behavior that we would now call prescientific, and one that is certainly nonmechanistic. This expression of it comes from the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, the state-of-the-art compendium of 45

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philosophical theology of the thirteenth century, and it serves there as the fifth of St. Thomas’s famous proofs for the existence of God. He writes, The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things that lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by an archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.1

Here we see that even in the prescientific era, thinking persons contemplated the “governance of the world,” and deduced something about the nature of the world from the behavior of inanimate objects within it. The noteworthy features of the behavior were clear: consistent or law-like behavior, that is, “acting always or nearly always,” “not fortuitously”; and, intentional or volitional behavior—“so as to obtain the best result” or “designedly do they achieve their end.” This consistent intentional behavior of objects, St. Thomas claimed, could not be ascribed to the bodies themselves because they lacked intelligence, so it was ascribed instead to “some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence,” which being we, or at least Aquinas, called God. Nearly every feature of this argument, or proof, has been rendered anachronistic or quaint to most moderns by the intellectual revolution we call Newtonianism. Even such a sympathetic an author as Paul Davies, who entitled one of his recent books, The Mind of God, agrees that Aquinas’s view of the world as consistently intentional has been overthrown by an alternative collection of explanations typically expressed as natural law and typically pictured as a clockwork universe. Aquinas’ argument collapsed in the seventeenth century with the development of the science of mechanics. Newton’s laws explain the motion of material bodies perfectly adequately in terms of inertia and forces without the need for divine supervision. Nor did this purely mechanistic account of the world have any place for teleology (final or goal-directed causes). The explanation for the behavior of objects is to be sought in proximate physical causes—i.e., forces impressed upon them locally by other bodies.2

This is a world in which the behavior of objects is indeed consistent, in fact perfectly law-abiding but in which the character of the laws is not intentional but mechanical, giving a picture of matter in motion, motion due to force, forces that (as we say) enforce obedient but blind consequences.

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An early, and still very impressive, example of Newtonian mechanical explanations was the account given of the motion of the bodies in our solar system as described by Newton’s famous Three Laws of Motion and the further Law of Universal Gravitation that he formulated. These combined to give a system of the world that made no reference to ends, goals, or intentions (in fact gave no description of why, or even how, gravity actually worked) but nevertheless provided a mathematically complete, physically unified, and observationally precise description of a vast host of celestial phenomena. In fact, the apparent completeness and omnicompetence of a Newtonian description of the motion of the planets is well illustrated by the anecdote of an exchange alleged to have occurred when the French mathematical physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace presented formally his magnum opus (a thick book on celestial mechanics) to Emperor Napoleon. Napoleon, noting (or having been briefed on) the character of the world it portrayed, supposedly said to Laplace, “I see that in your book you have made no mention of God,” to which Laplace replied, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”3 The degree to which Laplace believed in the predictability of a mechanical system and the determinism to which it led him is vividly captured in his famous quotation: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.4

The clockwork universe was certainly understood by some to portray a work whose operation, if not its very origin, could be understood wholly in terms of mechanism: the operation of material causes without goal, end, or intention, without choice or alternative, consistent yet purposeless, and (in contradiction to Thomas Aquinas) serving as a proof, if for anything, then for the irrelevance of divine purpose in the working of the world. It was a natural, perhaps unreflective, outworking of this frame of mind that led the physics department of the California Institute of Technology to choose a title for the elaborate video version they filmed of a full year’s introductory course in college physics; they called this expensive production “The Mechanical Universe.”5 The continuing intellectual power of such a Newtonian description, even to religious believers, might best be made clear by a sort of conundrum:

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among those of us who would think it appropriate to address to the Deity a humble prayer for the healing of disease, or the sending of necessary rain, how many would have the faith or daring to pray for the occurrence of an eclipse of the sun, other than one of those predicted by Newtonian means? Fish in the sea, we are told, find it so natural to be surrounded by water as to be wholly unaware of its existence; so we, too, live in a context in which we find it natural to seek and to be contented with mechanical and impersonal (rather than intentional or volitional) explanations for what we see happening around us, particularly so in the behavior of inanimate matter. In fact, so ingrained are these expectations that it takes a real effort of imagination to contemplate an alternative world in which phenomena are or could be any different. But as a tool to stimulate the imagination, in the spirit of allegorical literature, let me now try to tell a “Tale of Two Cities,” that I propose to be located in parallel but distinct universes and that I will name, for the purposes of contrast, the cities of Mechanicsville and Teleopolis. Let me convey some features of the account of their natural worlds that the dwellers in these two cities give. We are going to see, in various areas of experience, their accounts of common phenomena making use of quite different modes of explanation. I have to proceed by selective example here, and will avoid the full mathematical elaboration that thinkers from these two cities give to their descriptions. I can, though, give at least a literary expression to some of the theories adopted in the two cities; my purpose in each example is to try to show how a nonmechanistic theory differs from a mechanistic one. For a first example, light shines on our two cities; in both places, scientists use a model invoking light rays for describing its behavior. In both places, it is long been noted that a ray of light, falling obliquely onto a flat surface like that of water, does not continue straight, but is deflected, or refracted, where it enters the water. In Mechanicsville, the law of refraction for this process is well known; it describes in mathematical form the relation between the angle of incidence or ray angle in the air, and the angle of refraction or ray angle in the water. On earth, we call this Snel’s Law. In Teleopolis, the refraction of light that occurs there, too, is described by a wholly different theory. There it is noted that light moves more slowly in water than in air, and light, leaving a source in the air and getting to a destination in the water, in fact follows a path bent so as to lengthen its path in the air, and shorten its path in the water, in just such a way, along just such a path, as to minimize the time it takes to get from its source to its destination. Thus, “a principle of least time” governs light in Teleopolis. Unlike Snel’s Law, which applies only to refraction, the teleopolitan principle of least time has the advantage of also serving to explain ordinary

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straight-line propagation of light and the behavior of light upon reflection from a mirror. Let us consider a second example of a physical phenomenon that can be explained in two distinct ways. They have “electricity” in Mechanicsville, and thinkers there model it as being due to the motion of charged particles, mobile in materials called conductors, moving in response to forces. The picture of electric charge is that it is indestructible, so that a flow of electricity in a conductor, upon reaching a junction, might divide in some proportions, with a portion of the current flowing into each of several alternative conductors. There is a law in Mechanicsville, called the Loop Theorem, that describes the mechanism that enforces at junctions in a conductive network the division of electrical current into these proportions. Now Teleopolis is electrified too, and oddly enough, thinkers there also have noticed that electrical phenomena can be explained in terms of the motion of indestructible electric charges though matter. They, too, have formulated a theory that describes how electric currents divide in flowing through a network, but it is a very different sort of explanation. In Teleopolis, out of all the divisions and distributions that current could take in flowing through a network, scientists have noted that the one that actually occurs is that unique pattern of flow of electric charge that minimizes the total rate of generation of heat by the passage of the electricity through the conductive network. A principle of minimum heat governs electricity in Teleopolis. There are many more examples of similarities in the behavior of the physical world that are different in theoretical description in our two imagined cities. Let me add just one more example. In both Mechanicsville and Teleopolis, the character of matter itself is modeled as the motion of microscopic particles through empty space. In Mechanicsville, the scientific picture of the motion of material particles is a description of their positions and velocities at any given moment and a knowledge of the forces that act on these particles due to interactions between them. Therefore, laws of motion can be used to predict, from present values of position and velocity and present values of the forces between the particles, the new values of position and velocity that must obtain in each next new instant of time. By calculating these forces, the motion of particles can be predicted into the future in Mechanicsville. The execution of this intellectual program gives just the sort of mechanical determinism that was envisioned by Laplace in our world. In the world of Teleopolis, there are no forces; or at least, theorists there have no need of that hypothesis. The description of the motion of particles is instead conducted in terms of energy alone. Any particle is viewed as possessing two kinds of energy: kinetic energy (energy due to its motion), and potential energy (energy due to its position relative to other particles).

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The deep discovery in Teleopolis is that the motion of any particle, from its starting point and time to its final place and time, is governed by a selection principle. It says that of all the paths through space and time that the particle might have taken from start to finish, in Teleopolis the path actually taken is always the one that minimizes the average value of the difference between kinetic and potential energy. By the Teleopolitan scientists who have discovered it, this is called the principle of least action. In these three examples, we can now see that there is a systematic difference between the pictures of the nature of the world in our two imagined cities of Mechanicsville and Teleopolis. In Mechanicsville, there is a law for everything: for every particle, process, and instant, there is only one thing that can and must happen; determinism reigns, alternatives are not to be thought of, and the present determines the future ineluctably. In Teleopolis, by contrast, there is a principle of minimization for everything: for every combination of starting and ending states of the world, there is always the intellectual requirement of contemplating all the different ways by which the initial state might have become the final state, and there is always a principle that selects, out of all these imaginable ways, the unique way that is actually realized in the physical world. It is always the way that is optimal, in the sense of least time, least heat, least action, and so forth; the one way that surpasses any alternative in this minimization of some quantity. We can easily imagine some features of the picture of the natural world that are likely to be painted by thinkers in these two cities. In Mechanicsville, the operation of the world can be fully explained in terms of obedience to laws that apply locally at each place and time; there is no appeal to foresight, plan, intention, or goal. In Teleopolis, physical explanations are all global or holistic; they apply to a system in its entirety; and they have a very different flavor, making it seem as if matter had foresight, as if all alternatives were considered, as if matter were mindful, volitional, or purposeful, and even as if there were a mind, will, or purpose to account for the principles that govern the behavior of the world. Those who recall the fourfold theory of causation developed by the Greeks will recognize that scientists in our two cities are offering explanations invoking the same material causes of behavior, in that both treat light as rays, electricity as motion of charges, matter as made of particles. It is in a separate aspect of causation that thinkers in these two cities differ: in Mechanicsville, efficient causes are all that are required or expected of scientific laws; they express the mechanism by which the present turns into the future. In Teleopolis, on the other hand, final causes are at the heart and core of all the principles that select, from among all candidate alternatives, those actual occurrences that best achieve (as it were) some goal, end, or telos by the minimization of some quantity.

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These two quite distinct modes of explanation are labeled mechanistic and variational in the mathematical trade used to express them; and I have tried to communicate how different in character are the mechanistic descriptions used in Mechanicsville, compared to the variational ones used in Teleopolis, to describe the different physical universes we imagined to apply as if on two distinct planets. The biggest surprise, however, is to disclose that our world, the actual world we live in, is literally both Mechanicsville and Teleopolis. To put it another way, however different might be the character of the theories used by thinking residents in these two mythical cities to account for the behavior of matter, a visitor to them could not tell just by looking at the behavior of matter in these two cities at which of them one had arrived. In fact, the behavior of light, or electricity, or particles in motion on our earth, in all the cities of our world, can be fully and accurately described both by mechanistic and by variational theories. What, then, are we to make of having two distinct forms of theoretical description of the one physical universe we live in? First, I need to assert that there is no way, now or in future, to validate or confirm one of these two formulations and to disprove or refute the other by having one succeed and the other fail to describe some experimental result. Every area of physics we know that has both mechanistic and variational descriptions also offers a mathematical proof that the two formulations will make the same predictions as to the results of each possible experimental test. The two outlooks, so different in character and viewpoint, are mathematically equivalent when it comes to experimentally testable predictions. Either of the two formulations, mechanistic or variational, could be adopted as a starting point and then entail the other as a consequence. This surprising fact—the uselessness of appeal to experiment to settle a theoretical competition—is a fine example of a problem known to philosophers of science as the “underdetermination of theory by experiment.” It is an illustration of the awkward fact that any set of experimental data, however large or broad, can still be described by two (or more) theories, not just trivially or triflingly different but possibly of a wholly different character or affect. Second, if experiment cannot resolve the dispute, could not we just pragmatically deny any real difference between mechanistic and variational approaches? Could not we just say they are two distinct but equivalent mathematical formulations of the same physical theory? This might indeed suffice if we focused only on the goal of the prediction of experimental results. In practice, however, we expect more from a theory, and, in existential fact, we extract from such theories whole portraits of the character of the physical world. So, while mechanistic and variational theories might agree

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as to experimental predictions, they differ so radically in their depictions of the character of the world that I find it impossible to deny the distinction between them. Richard Feynman similarly noted in another context that two theories can be physically equivalent and still be psychologically inequivalent,6 and to my view, mechanistic and variational descriptions of reality are psychologically inequivalent because they appeal to wholly distinct explanatory mechanisms. They seem to attribute to the natural world wholly antithetical themes: blind obedience versus apparent foresight; fixed single outcome versus host of alternatives; law versus principle; apparently mindless versus apparently volitional; as-if purposeless versus as-if intentional. A third alternative would recognize these viewpoints as distinct but would seek to make one of them foundational and the other derivative. The problem is, Which of them should be assigned the deeper, more fundamental status? Here is the difficulty: (1) there is no experimental guidance to be had, as experimental tests cannot privilege one viewpoint over the other; (2) there is no mathematical guidance to be had, as mathematics can only prove the viewpoints are equivalent (a symmetrical relationship); and (3) yet there might be grounds outside of the strictly experimental or mathematical to guide us. In cases such as these, the history and philosophy of science suggest that the deeper or more fundamental theory is likely to be the one possessing greater elegance and beauty, or greater generality and fruitfulness. If these criteria are to be used, it is fair to say that variational principles are of the greatest generality and fruitfulness of any yet found in physics. Speaking of variational methods, Max Planck, the German scientist who was the first quantum physicist, wrote, But there is another, far broader law, which has the property of giving a specific, unequivocal answer to each and every sensible question concerning the course of a natural process; as far as we can see, this law—like the law of conservation of energy—possesses an exact validity even in the most modern parts of physics. But what we must regard as the greatest wonder of all is the fact that the most adequate formulation of this law creates the impression in every unbiased mind that nature is ruled by a rational, purposive will.7

Now given all these considerations—the equivalence (on scientific grounds) of the mechanistic and variational expressions of theory, and the legitimate (if extra-scientific) preference perhaps to be accorded to variational expressions on philosophy-of-science grounds—one is entitled to ask, Why have I not heard of variational outlooks? Why have they not captured the imagination of thinkers and lent weight to nonmechanistic views of the nature of the world?

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Let me say first that it is not that variational expressions have only recently been discovered; all the examples I gave for light, electricity, and motion, and also other cases, have been known for over a century. The original principle of least action was known to Leibniz in the eighteenth century and may in fact have been partly responsible for the philosophical outlook captured by the phrase “the best of all possible worlds.” Thus, if novelty is not the explanation, what is? I can think of three explanations, two of them innocent, and one suspect. The first is priority in time. In each case I know, the mechanistic explanation came first, and the variational one came later by a generation or more. Therefore mechanistic explanations have had chronological priority, which has helped to make variational expressions seem a mere luxury as latecomers to the intellectual fray. The second innocent reason is that of difficulty; mechanistic descriptions of the motion of matter lead rather naturally to differential calculus, a subject of adequate difficulty in itself; but variational descriptions require the further mathematical development called the “calculus of variations,” to which most students of physics attain but that (I suspect) few philosophical thinkers reach. The mathematical vocabulary and techniques necessary have perhaps combined to make variational methods less well known. A third and less innocent reason for the preference typically accorded to mechanistic description might be due to the metaphysical presuppositions of those who—for the first time in the eighteenth century—had to express a preference between the two views. The choice exercised in the tradition of the French Encyclopedists tilted emphatically and self-consciously toward mechanistic, and against variational, descriptions of reality. I think it would repay historians of science to find the reasons behind those preferences. Meanwhile, one is surely allowed to suspect that the philosophical predispositions of the Encyclopedists had something to do with their preference for mechanistic and impersonal Newtonian explanations, as opposed to variational explanations with their decided odor of teleology. Apart from these various possible reasons for the general tilt, in the worldview typical of our culture, in favor of mechanistic descriptions (as opposed to variational theories) in science, what can we conclude from the mere existence of a full set of nonmechanistic variational descriptions? First, we have to conclude that science as science has to be seen as unable to tell us which to prefer. If there is to be a preference, it must be attributable to extra-scientific considerations. This in turn provides us with an example of the failure of what I might call “scientism,” the belief that science, and only science, can answer any and all questions worth posing. Rather, we see here emerging naturally out of mathematical physics a very deep and interesting question, the answer to which cannot be found inside of science.

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Second, we can take a lesson from physics that may be applicable elsewhere in the sciences. In fact, the more reductionist one’s sympathies, the more broadly it might be applicable elsewhere. Imagine situating ourselves chronologically between Newton and his mechanism, and Lagrange and his variational methods, when the mechanistic description of planetary motion was well developed but the variational outlook was still uninvented. As we can now see in retrospect, the existence and experimental success of a complete and accurate mechanistic description did not then (and does not now) preclude the possibility of a future discovery of an equally complete and accurate description of the same phenomena but now in variational, even teleological, terms. This lesson can be learned from the past in physics; it may yet have relevance in the future of other sciences, such as geology and biology. What else can we make of the mere existence of variational alternatives to mechanistic theories of the behavior of matter in our physical universe? How seriously can we take their apparent appeal to foresight or volition? Can they rehabilitate the teleological argument of Aquinas for the existence of God? It has been a considerable temptation to generations of physicists with a predisposition to doubt materialism and determinism to appeal to purpose allegedly exhibited in the physical world and to design and volition expressed in its formation. The questions here stray outside of science, or even the history or philosophy of science, right into apologetics. Would the arguments of Aquinas about natural bodies acting “for an end,” “so as to obtain the best result” sound more persuasive to Teleopolitan scientists? Would the apparent purposefulness exhibited by inanimate matter there incline thinkers’ views toward a belief in God? Perhaps it would in Teleopolis; perhaps the discovery of Lagrangian or variational mechanics made a huge impression on Aquinas-trained Catholic eighteenth-century physicists in our world—that would be a worthwhile research topic in the history of science. However, I am skeptical of using a technical argument from physics to infer character traits about God, which is what we would be doing here. Let me explain why I am skeptical, first with an anecdote and then with a more serious reason. The story goes that a devout cleric once asked a scientist, “What can you conclude about the nature of God from your study of the world?” He is supposed to have replied, “God seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.”8 Now maybe the preponderance of numbers of species of beetles, among all insects, really does tell us something about God’s preferences but you can see what a narrow range of God’s character traits, if any at all, we can discover from such an observation. Similarly with a physical-teleology argument, if we ask for the principle of least action to be our guide to the character of a purposive God, we might risk inferring a God of decidedly Scottish character, as if stingy enough with

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a limited supply of cosmic action as only to dole it out in some minimizing, cheeseparing fashion. If we were to be successful in influencing the agnostic to contemplate such a God of least action, I am certain that some doubter or skeptic would be tempted to entertain the extrapolation to the limiting case of a God of no action at all. If these are my anecdotal reasons for doubting the effectiveness of a variational route to belief in God, let me now close with my own outlook as a physicist and a theist on what can be concluded from the curious coexistence of separate variational and mechanistic expressions of physical law. I do not subscribe to the outlook, prominent in Anglo-American evangelicalism, that natural science has either the outcome, or the obligation, of necessarily creating belief in a benevolent God. I have lots of reasons, philosophical and theological, for preferring the view that scientific knowledge is not and ought not to be expected to be a prerequisite for warranted belief in the existence of God. As a practicing physicist, I nevertheless do know of the existence, within mainstream, universally accepted physics, of equivalent mechanistic and variational expressions of fundamental theories. What I make of this coexistence is a sort of negative conclusion, but nevertheless a conclusion welcome to any theist. In the existence of variational methods, I have a strong defeater for the claim that acceptance of a scientific outlook necessarily requires the adoption of a mechanistic worldview. In the existence of variational methods, I have a striking indication that the universe can be accurately and scientifically described in terms that make use of apparent purpose or goal. Finally, I have quite distinct evidence that on the very important question of the character of the natural world, science as science speaks, at best, equivocally, telling the disinterested observer that mechanistic and variational outlooks provide scientific descriptions of equal adequacy. This in turn points directly to the inadequacy of science to provide an answer to the perfectly legitimate and existentially captivating question of whether the universe is “friendly to purpose.” Far from denying purpose, scientific theorizing is entirely open to purpose, and science points outside itself for anyone who wants an answer to the question of the deep character of the natural world.

NOTES 1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, ques. 2, art. 3; the quotation may conveniently be found in Peter Kreeft, A Shorter Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 63. 2. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 200.

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3. The genesis of this oft-repeated anecdote is traced by Brandon Watson in his online site Houyhnhnm Land, at branemrys.org/archives/2004/08/i-have-no-needof-that-hypothesis/ (accessed December 17, 2007). 4. The intelligence that Laplace imagines in this paragraph has come to be called “Laplace’s Demon”; see Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902; repr, New York: Dover, 1995), 4. 5. The telecourse, The Magnificent Universe . . . and Beyond is now a resource available on DVD, to be found at www.learner.org/resources/series42.html (accessed December 17, 2007). 6. Richard P. Feynman, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics,” in Nobel Lectures Physics 1963–1970 (Elsevier, 1972), 177. 7. This quotation may be found in the 1937 lecture “Religion and Natural Science,” in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, ed. Max Planck (London: Williams and Norgate, 1950), 177. 8. The expression is attributed to J. B. S. Haldane, and has become the title of a book. Arthur V. Evans and Charles L. Bellamy, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

4 Design in Nature: What Is Science Properly Permitted to Think?1 Del Ratzsch

In writings of scientists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, one frequently encounters the idea that there are empirically observable features of both cosmic and biological nature that can be best—or perhaps only—explained by reference to deliberate, intelligent design. Virtually without exception, the major figures of that lengthy period—Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Herschel, Whewell, and Maxwell—held such views. In fact, the early nineteenth century saw publication of the Bridgewater Treatises—a series of eight volumes, each authored by a (or the) top practitioner in some scientific area, laying out the scientific discoveries in that area that could be construed as evidences of a designing hand in nature. However, for a variety of reasons, design thinking in broadly scientific contexts subsequently fell onto hard times.2 Recent decades, though, have seen something of a resurgence of design thinking. That resurgence began in the 1970s with exploration of cosmic fine-tuning and discussion of various “cosmological anthropic principles.” Then, in the 1990s, design discussions began seeping into a few biological discussions as a small group of biologists and biochemists came to suspect (like their predecessors) that there were in some biological phenomena empirically determinable evidences of design, that is phenomena that could only adequately be understood and explained at least in part in intentional terms. Such suspicions constituted one impetus for what is now known as the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM), committed to the ideas (1) that there are (or can be) evidences of deliberate design in nature, (2) that such design can be in principle empirically identified and investigated, (3) that such investigation can in principle be genuinely and legitimately scientific, and (4) that such positions merit a fair scientific hearing. 57

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The majority (not all) of the IDM constituency also rejects (especially Darwinian) evolutionary theory as being incapable of adequately explaining the phenomena they take to be indicative of design, and the majority (not all) of the movement takes the designer to be God of the Bible. Such suggestions have elicited an ongoing firestorm of opposition and criticism. That opposition is nowhere more vociferously expressed than in the work of Richard Dawkins who has described attempts to explain biological complexity by appeal to a designer (which Dawkins takes to be a question-begging appeal to complexity) as “cowardly and dishonest.”3 Advocacy of design theories, as Dawkins sees it, is not just a scientific failing but is thus also a moral failing, that is, it is wicked to think such things in science. What underlies this type of outrage? In some cases, philosophical commitments and even antireligious bias fuel the fury. The emotionalism of various academics aside, however, there are two significant questions in the general neighborhood. The first is a philosophy of science issue: is it even in principle legitimate to appeal to the concept of (especially supernatural) intelligent design in the context of natural science? The second is an empirical issue: were we to answer the above question in the affirmative, do the empirical data we have at present actually support design views or theories? I will not address that latter question (that falls outside philosophical territory) except merely to note that I do not find the purely empirical cases produced specifically by the intelligent design movement to be persuasive.4 In what follows, I will focus on the former question, which is a variant form of the question of whether or not scientists qua scientists can properly and legitimately be forbidden to think about (supernatural) intelligent design within scientific contexts.

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM: BASIC LANDSCAPE The idea of (supernatural) intelligent design as an authentic scientific explanatory or descriptive conceptual resource strikes many people as a prima facie nonstarter—as virtually a category mistake. Many, perhaps most, would agree with Eugenie Scott that “to be dealt with scientifically, ‘intelligence’ must also be natural, because all science is natural . . . Any theory with a supernatural foundation is not scientific.”5 What is the justification for that universal stipulation? The standard answer involves appeal to some version of naturalism. Naturalism comes in a variety of flavors. Metaphysical (or philosophical) naturalism is the view that the natural realm is the totality of reality that there simply is no supernatural realm. Although there are some who explicitly and implausibly

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claim that genuine science presupposes philosophical naturalism,6 most are a bit more circumspect, holding that science employs and requires only methodological naturalism. The standard concept of methodological naturalism can be characterized informally as follows: Philosophical naturalism may or may not be correct (science itself simply takes no position), but since science cannot deal with the supernatural, it is an essential methodological principle of science that science must proceed as if philosophical naturalism is correct.7

Thus again Eugenie Scott: Science has made a little deal with itself; because you can’t put God in a test tube (or keep it [sic] out of one) science acts as if the supernatural did not exist. This methodological materialism [methodological naturalism] is the cornerstone of modern science.8

STANDARD CASES FOR METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM If methodological naturalism is in fact normative for genuine science, then standard design theories are evidently in some difficulty.9 What exactly is the justification for taking methodological naturalism as characterizing science? There are several standard (not all mutually consistent) answers to that question, which might be categorized as conceptual, empirical, and pragmatic. None, I think, are entirely compelling, for reasons I will briefly sketch. Conceptual According to some, the methodological naturalistic prohibition on reference to anything beyond the natural realm is part of the very character of science itself. Thus, for instance, Michael Ruse: [Q]ua science, that is qua an enterprise formed through the practice of methodological naturalism, science has no place for talk of God . . . [I]nasmuch as one is going to the scientist for science, theology can and must be ruled out as irrelevant. [my emphasis]10

and again: [T]he methodological naturalist insists that, inasmuch as one is doing science, one avoid all theological or other religious reference. In particular, one denies God a role in creation. [my emphasis]11

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Nancey Murphy is even more specific: [What] we might call methodological atheism . . . is by definition common to all natural science [my emphasis]12

and again Scott: By definition, science cannot consider supernatural explanations. . . . So by definition, if an individual is attempting to explain some aspect of the natural world using science he or she must act as if there were no supernatural forces operating on it. [my emphasis] 13

It seems to me that neither sort of attempt can withstand much scrutiny. As to definitional cases for methodological naturalism, it is worth keeping in mind that such attempts must be at least prima facie tentative for the simple reason that no one actually has a completely workable definition of science (indeed, not even necessary and sufficient conditions).14 Even if we thought we did, such definitions (even those employed by scientists themselves) have been historically unstable. In fact, the definitions employed by scientists themselves changed substantively at least four times during the past century. Furthermore, attempts to control the shape of science by way of appeal to authoritative definitions seem more in keeping with Medieval philosophy (or theology) than with contemporary intellectual—let alone scientific—procedures. After all, definitions are human constructions. They are not found in the bottom of test tubes, carved on some stratum within the earth’s crust, outlined in the constellations, or found in authoritative dictionaries that fall from the skies. Exactly why human definitions should be inviolably normative for attempts to understand the natural cosmos around us is unclear. Empirical According to one popular basis for methodological naturalism, there is a scientifically fatal disconnect between the empirical and the supernatural, including supernatural design. Scientific Emptiness References beyond nature in science are widely seen as being scientifically bankrupt. That bankruptcy was, the claim continues, not yet clear to such historical figures as Kepler, Newton, and others who quite happily incorporated theological principles and implications into their (alleged) science. However, the scientific emptiness of appeal to supernatural agency,

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design, and the like became increasingly evident as science progressed and is now starkly clear. Such claims are only slightly less shaky than definitional stipulations. (And, of course, history, even if accurately construed, would not establish the scientific normativity of prohibitions on things toward the nonnatural end of the spectrum.) The historical allegations are problematic in any case. According to historian of science Timothy Lenoir, “in early nineteenthcentury Germany a very coherent body of theory based on a teleological approach was worked out, and it did provide a constant fertile source for the advance of biological science on a number of different research fronts.”15 More global (and more striking) is a claim of physicist Max Planck: Amid the more or less general laws which mark the achievements of physical science during the course of the last centuries, the principle of least action is perhaps that which . . . may claim to come nearest to [the] ideal final aim of theoretical research [i.e., to “condense all natural phenomena which have been observed and are still to be observed into one simple principle”].16

Indeed, some historians of science have argued that the early modern Western European Christian intellectual context provided conceptual resources utterly essential to the very existence and rise of science. That fact not only casts some doubt upon the present claim that nonnatural considerations were historically scientifically empty (or even detrimental to science), but that also might explain why no culture lacking such conceptual resources ever produced anything such as modern theoretical science. That the (at least implicit) relevance of not merely teleological but even theological conceptual structures is not mere historical curiosity is suggested by physicist Paul Davies; he believes that “Science began as an outgrowth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists . . . accept an essentially theological worldview.”17 It is frequently asked, Where is any payoff for design ideas in science? If Davies is correct—and I think that he is—then it may be that the success of science itself is such a payoff, just as for some Quinean mathematical naturalists the success of science is an empirical confirmation of mathematics. Most scientists do not seem to take the success of science as either design payoff or design confirmation; that may be because the situation has taken on the mask of the familiar.18 Iris Murdoch once remarked, “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have the things about us.”19 Perhaps we should be, but we are not: we have grown jadedly out of that. Similarly, consider the often-remarked unreasonable—even “spooky”20— scientific effectiveness of mathematics. The stark fact is that the best understanding of natural reality we can generate is so shaped according to the

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most mind-redolent structures we know (mathematics) that some people refuse to consider something as proper science unless it is mathematizable. One might think a priori that the citizens of such a mathematized, mind-redolent world would find the evidence for deliberate design to be overpowering. Perhaps sometimes we do (as even Darwin testified).21 In any case, it may be that we do not so much need prediction of something new and otherwise unexpected (as often demanded of design advocates) as merely to recognize the objective unexpectedness of what is so familiarly under our noses. Again, it is not necessarily irrelevant that historically it was not until nature was looked at as a product of design that science itself really got off the ground. Unfalsifiability It is widely claimed that any sort of design hypothesis (concerning nature) is unfalsifiable and consequently scientifically illegitimate. This objection generally rests on the perception that design attempts are reconcilable with absolutely everything, thus impossible to pin down to any specifiable empirical content. Even were strict falsifiability impossible (which, surprisingly enough, is in fact the case for nearly every legitimate scientific theory),22 there could be evidence against design adequate for any legitimate scientific purpose. If we had good empirical reason to believe that the history of human evolution, for instance, really was a totally random matter, then although the absence of deliberate design would not be strictly entailed,23 claims that our history exhibited a lack of design (in that specific instance) could well be scientifically defensible or scientifically supported. Given the character of science, that is not only adequate but perhaps as good as one can demand. In any case, even strict unfalsifiability does not imply absence of relevance or of substantive impact. Science itself contains principles such as the uniformity of nature which are strictly unfalsifiable, but which are scientifically legitimate, relevant, and even beyond that, absolutely indispensable. Nonpredictiveness Closely intertwined with the unfalsifiability issue is a charge that intelligent design generates no predictions. Here again the issue is not so straightforward as often thought. First, it is widely recognized that even the most upright scientific theory makes no predictions in isolation but only in conjunction with a variety of other inferential resources—boundary conditions, auxiliary hypotheses, instrumentation theories, and so forth. Second, different scientifically essential principles operate at different levels in a

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conceptual hierarchy within science, at different degrees of removal from the empirical trenches. What precise connection a conceptual component of science should have with empirical predictions is in part a function of the role that component plays in science and the level at which it operates. Of course, even overarching high-level (or deep underlying) principles must generate some payoff in the broader scientific picture, but that payoff does not reduce to anything so simple as particular identifiable empirical predictions. Design theories might find their legitimacy at some particular point within the structure of science for which demands for unique and specifiable empirical predictions are misplaced. The further up the hierarchy in which design concepts operate, the less rigid will be any connection between such concepts and empirical data and the less stringent the empirical demands that can meaningfully be placed upon such concepts. On the other hand, the further up the hierarchy in which design operates, the less will empirical scientific cases substantiate design principles. Thus, what a design theory might gain in immunity, it might lose in immediate empirical substance. In general, however, what characteristic it is or is not appropriate to demand of some component of the scientific conceptual hierarchy depends on where in the hierarchy that component operates. Thus, what does or does not count as a fatal difficulty for design theories will depend upon the exact nature and level of such theories. Specific proposals might be quite properly rejected for failing legitimate requirements at specific levels, but blanket illegitimacy cases are more difficult to defend. Suppose, however, that specific predictive demands were appropriate. It certainly does not seem to be true that design theories are inherently nonpredictive. If we know or believe that some subsystem of some object is designed for some purpose or function, we can often predict some things concerning not only that subsystem itself but even concerning the existence and characteristics of correlated entities or other subsystems. It might turn out that the specific design theories associated with contemporary design advocates make no requisite predictions, but if that is a failure it may be simply a failure of local theory, not a principial problem. Pragmatic It is widely suggested that a science unprotected by methodologically natural strictures is at deep risk, that is, allowing nonnatural concepts to roam unchecked within science poses serious potential for destruction. This worry is not just a recent invention. Indeed, one can find it expressed by such prominent and devout scientists as Robert Boyle: “[A] naturalist who would Deserve the Name, must not let the Search for Knowledge of First Causes, make him Neglect the Industrious Indagation of Efficients.”24

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In 1623, Francis Bacon thought that actual harm to science was already evident: “The handling of final causes mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent enquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further inquiry.”25 Similar warnings continue to be issued regularly. For instance, Robert Pennock: “Once such supernatural explanations are permitted they could be used in chemistry and physics as easily as Creationists have used them in biology and geology. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.”26 The precise risk, then, is that if it were permissible to appeal to design, supernatural agency, and the like in science, then scientists, being as human as any other group, would succumb to the always present temptation to take that easy way out when confronting seemingly intractable theoretical problems, such as choosing to appeal to design, nonnatural agency, and other such ready-made answers rather than to persevere in the grinding, slogging, seemingly doomed search for natural answers. In Bacon’s terms, scientists would give up, quit (arrest inquiry) too soon to the ultimate detriment of science itself, given that continued search just might ultimately uncover the natural solution. That is indeed a legitimate worry, and I think that methodological naturalism as a first approximation pragmatic (but defeasible) strategy may well be defensible. The ultimate upshot of that worry, though, is perhaps less transparent than often thought, for two reasons. First, there is a corresponding worry on the opposite end of the same stick—the risk of refusing to recognize when it is time to quit. Science historically has abandoned quite a number of previously pursued projects, for example, perpetual motion machines. Such projects have typically been abandoned for very good reason, which does not change the fact that recognition of when it was time to drop pursuit was to the ultimate benefit of science, and that science could have continued only “to the great arrest and prejudice” of further productive inquiry. (A related issue will be addressed a bit later.) Second, it is not at all evident that either science or scientists are quite so susceptible to the temptations of intellectual sloth as apparently presumed. Indeed, the history of science itself would suggest that the risks are not all that great on precisely this point. Historically, no disaster such as that darkly hinted above by Pennock occurred. In fact, if the history of science told by critics of teleology, creationism, intelligent design, and the like is accurate, during the nineteenth century, previously robust and entrenched supernatural design explanations (such as Paley, the Bridgewater Treatises, and so forth) lost the scientific battle to mere fledgling naturalistic explanations—hardly what one would expect if merely allowing currently dis-

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enfranchised supernatural design explanations into the conversation were likely to destroy current mature and robust natural science. Thomas Huxley once remarked that, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every new science as the strangled snakes beside [the cradle] of Hercules.”27 If the infant Hercules could strangle the serpents that surrounded his cradle, it is not terribly likely that the adult Hercules would be done in by rogue nightcrawlers.

MORE (POTENTIAL) RISKS? Although the hazards of pursuing degenerating (or degenerate) research programs beyond any fruitful point might, perhaps, be less detrimental to science than giving up too soon, the existence of even those lesser hazards at least suggest that methodological naturalistic constraints could have their down sides. In fact, I think that there are potentially several such. I shall very briefly discuss some general considerations and then look at two possible specific examples in a bit more detail. Let us begin with a story. Suppose that during the final prelaunch crew briefing for NASA’s first manned mission to Mars, the head of NASA warns the crew of the dangers of starting public panics and instructs them to make no mention in any of their reports of aliens regardless of what they happen to find on Mars. The restriction does make some sense, but suppose that the first thing the crew sees upon exiting their lander is an utterly undeniable bulldozer. The question instantly arises, of course: where did that come from? The crew has a problem answering that question. Given the prohibition barring any reference to aliens, the crew really has only two options: (1) they can simply refrain from addressing the question, or (2) they can try to construct a (nonalien) theory of the natural chemical evolution of Martian bulldozers. That means that their science of Mars will be either (1) woefully incomplete (leaving out perhaps the single most fascinating aspect of the mission) or (2) outrageously mistaken. The basic problem with prestipulated conceptual and/or theoretical boundaries is that if reality itself happens to fall outside those boundaries, theorizing within the confines of those boundaries will inevitably generate either incompleteness or error. Methodological naturalism is a stipulated prohibition on anything outside the boundaries of the “natural” playing any conceptual role in our scientific attempts to understand the cosmos around us. If it were to turn out that reality itself chose not to abide by our restrictions (and why should it not?), if scientifically relevant reality falls outside methodological naturalist boundaries, then scientific thinking and theorizing that is forbidden to cross those boundaries will inevitably be either incomplete or mistaken.

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Of course, it might be claimed that incompleteness in science is not particularly surprising, that science does not claim to be complete, and that science cheerfully admits to realms of reality that it does not pretend to address; although that might depend upon exactly who is doing the talking.28 If science is not considered to be (in principle) competent to all reality, however, then the freedom to recognize when to quit pursuing specific programs becomes even more imperative. Blindly and doggedly trying to push into areas of noncompetence will produce mainly fruitless wheel spinning. On the other hand, methodological naturalism conjoined with aspirations for completeness has substantive implications. First, if one restricts science to the natural (even just methodologically) but then assumes that science can in principle get to all truth, then one has in effect implicitly presupposed philosophical naturalism because on that view all truth will be natural. Even if one stipulates methodological naturalism as essential to science, then assumes merely that science is competent for all physical matters or that what science does (properly) generate concerning the physical realm will, in principle, be truth, then if the truth of the specific matter in question is nonnatural, even the most excruciatingly proper naturalistic scientific deliverances on that matter may be wide of the mark, typically in exactly the way a science built on philosophical naturalism would be. For practical purposes, that comes close to importing an assumption of philosophical naturalism into the inner structure of science. Beyond that, a strict methodological naturalism tells us at every level of explanation that the next more fundamental level of explanation (if any) must also be sought within the explanatory resources of the natural. That would mean that one must either abandon the project of further scientific understanding at some level of brute natural fact or seek a scientific explanation that could hold were philosophical naturalism true. Thus, if one conceptually links methodological naturalistic science to truth in certain ways, something paralleling both a conceptual and a practical commitment to philosophical naturalism comes out of the mix. Therefore, whether methodological naturalism in science has substantive philosophical implications (contrary to the common denial) or is philosophically neutral depends on what it operates in tandem with. At the very least, methodological naturalism makes the de facto assumption that there is an identifiable realm of reality that is functionally self-contained and that is functionally decoupled from the supernatural. That assumption is neither obvious, nor, since it is equivalent to an empirical universal negative, provable. Two further implications fall directly out of the above sorts of considerations. First, if there are relevant but nonnatural truths within the cosmos, a science forbidden the requisite conceptual resources will be unable to recognize or accommodate those truths. In that case, genuine understanding of the cosmos will be truncated. Second, given that possibility, the widely

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accepted “self-corrective” ability of science will be limited. If some relevant truth is nonnatural, then the eventual failure of a proposed naturalistic theory will lead not to subsequent acceptance of the correct (nonnaturalistic) theory but at most only to replacement of the defective naturalistic theory by another (ex hypothesi) defective naturalistic theory. Here again, if self-correction is linked even indirectly to truth, this comes very near to an implicit practical assumption of philosophical naturalism.

ACTUAL TROUBLE SPOTS? The foregoing catalog of worries might seem to involve primarily speculative, only potential, risks that methodological naturalism might pose for science. As interesting as such “in principle” risks might be, are there any traces of any serious, real life actual detrimental effects of employing even the most unbending methodological naturalism in science? I think that there are at least some hints of such cases, of which I shall discuss two. Methodological Naturalism and Biology With respect to the origin and diversity of biological life on earth, few can imagine any serious naturalistic candidates beyond unguided evolution. Because methodological naturalism says that naturalistic candidates constitute the entire catalog of legitimate, acceptable theories, and because unguided evolution is the only theory listed in that specific catalogue, unguided evolutionary theory becomes the only scientific game in town and thus the empirical default position. That is emphatically not to say that the empirical evidence does not in fact strongly support an evolutionary theory. I am not addressing that issue at all. It does mean that the relation between theory and empirical data becomes somewhat anomalous. Evidence of that peculiarity can be seen in statements such as the following from Richard Dawkins: “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available” (his emphasis).29 Equally starkly contraempirical claims come from Matthew Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh: “Of course, such studies may not show the evolution of a new ‘kind’ . . . as demanded by some neo-creationists. To scientists, however, such a concern is simply irrelevant since evolution necessarily generates higher-level patterns from lower-level processes.”30 Thus, when critics of evolution ask for evidence that, say, microevolution can result in macroevolution, the apparent response is that such questions of evidence are just irrelevant because evolution just has to work as advertised.

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Of course, unless one takes the (seriously implausible) view that philosophical naturalism is necessarily true, it will remain at least possible that unguided evolution (or indeed, any other naturalistic theory) is in fact wrong and that some nonnatural explanation is correct. That possibility in conjunction with a strict methodological naturalism generates a curious potential split between science and truth. That split surfaces in comments from several critics of Creationism, for instance, Douglas Futuyma: “It isn’t necessarily wrong. It just is not amenable to scientific investigation”;31 and Michael Ruse: “It is not necessarily wrong, but it is not science”;32 and Niles Eldredge: “It could even be true, but it cannot be construed as science.”33 This split reaches its most bizarre in Pennock’s resurrection of something like the old Medieval theological “two truth” position. That emerges in the following passage: To be sure, this [referring to a statement about a particular Darwinian mechanism] is an approximate and tentative scientific truth, not an ontological (metaphysical) truth in the sense that it cannot rule out the possibility that a supernatural Creator is involved in the process . . . Surely we may accept that statement [referring to a statement concerning a different evolutionary, genetic explanation] as true, even though, as a merely naturalistic scientific truth, it does not rule out the possibility of an intelligent supernatural cause . . . so it cannot be said to be absolutely true in the ontological (metaphysical) sense. Similarly, the Creationists’ supernatural story may be a metaphysical truth—God may have created the world 6,000 years ago but made it look older as “Appearance of Age” creationists hold—but it is not a scientific truth.34

Pennock here distinguishes between “merely naturalistic scientific truth” (presumably what a proper science defined by methodological naturalism generates) and “ontological (metaphysical) truth” (what most of us would call real truth). If we do make that distinction, then although mere naturalistic scientific truth may often or even usually correspond to real truth, if we mistakenly equate real truth with mere naturalistic scientific truth even on such purely material matters as the age of the earth, we will (again) be implicitly doing something akin to assuming philosophical naturalism. When specific theories are cited as superior regardless of the data, or when demands for supporting evidence are declared to be irrelevant, one suspects that some deeper factor than mere empirical data and objectivity may be doing some of the driving. In some specific cases, one can find clues as to what the relevant factor is. The factor in the present case for Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin is fairly evident: Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science . . . because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of

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science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.35

Methodological Naturalism and Cosmology Cosmology offers a number of intriguing examples of methodological (and philosophical) naturalism, generating both resistance to some designtropic ideas and overly tenacious allegiance to other design-phobic ideas, that is, both conformity to prohibitions and resistance to timely quitting. Some of the well-known initial resistance to Big Bang cosmology (due to its resemblance to creation-ex-nihilo theologies) might be classified as the former, while the associated refusal of Fred Hoyle and others to abandon steady-state cosmologies (pursuing them even to the point where they implied that the majority of the known universe was anomalous) might fit under the latter heading. But of more present interest is the recent (and continuing) debate involving fine-tuning, cosmological anthropic principles, and many-universe cosmologies. Very briefly, it was for many centuries believed that life (and species) as we know it was a result of deliberate and direct design. Darwin, after years of seeking and developing a natural and mechanical explanation, eventually proposed an evolutionary mechanism that was (it was argued) capable of generating (or mimicking) apparent exquisite biological design by blind natural means, that is, random variation sieved by natural selection (in conjunction with some auxiliary processes). It was noted, however (even by Darwin36) that evolution itself depended upon conditions and laws specific enough to themselves suggest design. Subsequent scientific developments began some decades ago to reveal just how specific the relevant conditions had to be, for instance, just how very special, unlikely, and improbable a place the earth was. Of course, the primary traditional means of overcoming unfavorable odds is to multiply tries. The increasingly apparent vastness of the cosmos, with its presumed numerous and varied planets (perhaps 107 in our galaxy alone, by some estimates) seemed to offer ample opportunities for the cosmos to produce suitable planets purely by chance. However, it also began looking increasingly as if the laws, constants, and boundary conditions necessary just to produce planets within a Big Bang cosmology were subject to wildly tight constraints. Indeed by at least one estimate, the odds of all the relevant factors being properly “tuned” for the bare production of planets (let alone life) were one in 10229.37 Such apparent “fine tuning” impressed even those unsympathetic to nonnatural explanations.38

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There was, of course, a readily available—indeed, nearly insistent— nonnatural explanation: that the reason the basic nomic structures and boundary conditions of the cosmos looked like they were deliberately designed was because they were deliberately designed. The laws, conditions, the parameters even of the Big Bang itself had been delicately adjusted for subsequent life. Naturalists, however, seemed to be stuck with a brute “aren’t-we-lucky-that-things-turned-out-in-this-hugely-improbable-way” as their final answer. Both inside and outside science, rational explanation typically trumps brute fact nonexplanations, so the ready availability of a nonnatural explanation for the empirically determinable, basic character of the cosmos created some conceptual unease for philosophical naturalists. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that it created an explanatory imperative. That may have been in part what Hoyle was feeling when despite initially arguing that that apparent fine-tuning really was just coincidence, he later said, “Such properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy coincidences. But there are so many odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them.”39 In fact, since methodological naturalism is independent of any procedure for determining when it is time to quit, running into this cosmological brute wall produced a practical explanatory imperative for many methodological naturalists as well. The subsequent response is well known. Because the standard procedure for overcoming unfavorable odds is to multiply tries, the only available naturalistic recourse was to multiply randomly varying universes—indeed, to proliferate them to the degree required to swamp odds on the order of 123 one in 1010 . 40 Some simply postulated infinitely many worlds. What exactly is the scientific situation with respect to such theories? One presumably needs a mechanism for generating those worlds. Otherwise, their postulation is just bald philosophical speculating—not science. There have been a number of proposed mechanisms for producing the requisite worlds. All are, of course, seriously speculative. On most tellings, the alternative universes are mutually inaccessible, meaning that from our world their empirical status is tenuous at best.41 Confirming claims of their actual existence would seem to be problematic. Falsifying claims of their actual existence would seem to be problematic. Furthermore, it appears that stepping back one level does not solve any of the fundamental problems. The production of multiple worlds intuitively would seem to require a structure of mechanisms, conditions and capabilities at least as demanding—or fine-tuned—as the worlds being produced. John Leslie, for instance, remarks, “Even when a Grand Unified Theory is selected cunningly to achieve the desired results—which . . . can look suspiciously like the ‘fine tuning’ which the inflationary hypothesis is so often praised for rendering unnecessary—you may still be forced to

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postulate a gigantic space containing rare regions in which inflation of the right type occurs.”42 Others have made similar points (in this and related contexts): Richard Swinburne says, “[T]he shape of the problem has in no way changed by postulating more universes”;43 and Ernan McMullin states, “[I]t is curious how the same challenge arises over and over.”44 As mentioned earlier, Richard Dawkins has (ill-temperedly) remarked that design theories attempting to explain complexity in terms of a designer of even greater complexity are “cowardly and dishonest.” Why that same moral opprobrium should not attach to those trying to explain the fine-tuning of our cosmos in terms of a comparably fine-tuned world-ensemble and a comparably fine-tuned world-ensemble generator is not clear. The payoff for all these universes is supposed to be an explanation not requiring a designer. Why that should be regarded as a payoff needs further exploration. In the earlier case of the Martian bulldozer, a proposed explanation that made no reference to design and intent would not be considered to be a payoff so much as a blatant denial of the obvious. It is only within the constraints of naturalism—philosophical or methodological—that a design-free explanation of something that looks designed and intended could automatically be considered a payoff. In any case, multiple-universe theories add another level of complexity having some serious attendant problems while reaping no obvious empirical gains. Let me briefly mention two additional considerations. The first is this. Throughout most scientific history, simplicity, elegance, and other allied considerations played substantive roles in theory construction and evaluation. One standard element in such considerations was various versions of Occam’s Razor. Yet, the impulse to avoid design concepts at the cost of countenancing huge rafts of alternative universes constitutes in effect an abandonment of that principle. For example, Paul Davies writes, “Invoking an infinite number of other universes just to explain the apparent contrivances of the one we see is pretty drastic, and in stark conflict with Occam’s razor.”45 Edward Harrison adds, “Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes, or design that requires only one.”46 In the case of infinitely many universes, Occam would be well advised to bring along something more than a mere razor, perhaps something more like a chainsaw. In fact, one might suspect that there is no qualitative explanatory gain from multiplying freestanding universes without end. Robert Boyle harbored a related worry concerning one specific sort of atomism in his own day: For he, that shall attentively consider, what the atomists themselves may be compelled to allow, concerning the eternity of matter, the origin of local motion . . . the infinity or boundlessness of space, the divisibleness or nondivisibility of each corporeal substance into infinite material parts, may clearly

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perceive, that the atomist, by denying that there is a God, cannot free his understanding from such puzzling difficulties, as he pretends to be the reason of his denial; for instead of one God, he must confess an infinite number of atoms to be eternal, self-existent, immortal, self-moving.47

The point for the present issue is that in adding infinitely many universes, one may not be getting any ultimate explanatory traction and may be importing more, and worse, puzzles than those with which one began.48 Of course, similar things could be alleged concerning design theories as well. They add not only an additional level of complexity (a designer) but one that perhaps imports even more puzzles than does an ensemble of other universes. There is, I think, one intriguing difference. The rough history, recall, is almost cyclic. Something appears to be a likely product of deliberate design. Often for philosophical reasons a natural, mechanistic, nondesign explanation is nonetheless sought. Once found, that explanation in its turn requires factors and conditions that in their turn, seem to be likely candidates for a design explanation. However, some deeper-level natural, mechanistic, nondesign explanation is again sought, and, when found, it, too, exhibits characteristics that seem to invite a design explanation. It was this pattern that McMullin was referring to in his earlier-quoted remark about the curiousness of the same challenge arising repeatedly. It is somewhat tempting to suggest that because we never get rid of the initial appearance of the need for design explanations at each level and that that need constitutes an explanatory requirement “all the way down,” indicating that the only sort of explanations that can stop the regress is a design explanation. The instant response, of course, is that whatever the explanatory temptation at each level, natural and mechanical explanations have ultimately proven explanatorily adequate at each of those successive levels and that if such iterations cut any ontological ice at all, any such case for design is paralleled by an exactly equally powerful case for naturalism. I do not think that counter can be casually dismissed. But the fact that the same explanation (design) suggests itself at each successive iteration may constitute a hint that no qualitative explanatory headway is being made by naturalistic proposals, and that the real explanatory promissory note is simply being passed on unpaid. Consider this analogy. Were an alien oscilloscope found on Mars, we would suspect that a design explanation would be demanded. Subsequent discovery of an automated Martian oscilloscopeproducing machine would change the location of the ultimate design input but would not in the slightest erode the ultimate design demand because that machine, in its turn, would be equally demanding of a design explanation. (This, incidentally, was a point Paley, Whewell, and others were already on to two centuries ago.) Similarly, in the current cosmic case, that the successive layers of proposed mechanical explanations differ at each level,

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but never discharge the mystery of the recurring fine-tuning, may constitute a regress, while the same possible design explanation might suggest that the parallel design track exhibits a recursion, whose stable character really does indicate an ultimate, ineradicable fact of design. I am not strongly pushing that idea, but it does seem to me that there is a potentially significant difference here that might indicate a foundational priority for design over ultimate brute mechanical naturalism. If that is the case, then unless deliberately halted at some level, doctrinaire conformity to methodological naturalism will guarantee that cosmology is driven ultimately into sterility. (Recall that methodological naturalism has no inherent stopping procedure.) Contrary to Lewontin’s earlier “no matter how counterintuitive,” it may be that at some height of counterintuitivity it really does matter.49

ONE MORE, SLIGHTLY QUIRKY, CONSIDERATION I include this section with some trepidation. Whenever even in-principle references to aliens arise in this context, the almost invariable temptation is to dismiss such references out of hand as the proper province only of loonies, such as UFO cranks and crop-circle devotees. It should be kept in mind, however, that whether or not there is any serious present evidence for aliens and alien activity, and what might be our proper rational stance toward various issues (including design) were there any such evidence, are two very different issues. The first may indeed at this point be the province of loonies. The second is not. It simply is not a principle of reason that science could not even in principle recognize any possible evidence of such beings or such activity no matter what that evidence was, for example, an alien craft landing on the Capitol lawn and proceeding to blow away the Washington Monument. A number of prominent scientists (Hoyle, Francis Crick, and others) have argued that life could not have arisen by natural processes under the prevailing early conditions and time constraints on earth, and that life consequently had to have been brought here, deliberately or otherwise, from elsewhere. It is at least possible in that case that life was specifically engineered for earth conditions; in short, that life as we know it is an artifact of intelligent design and deliberate agency. There may be no plausible evidence whatever for such a view, but there is nothing inherently unscientific in the idea that life as we know it on earth is a designed artifact, and that it is at least in principle possible for us to discover that fact through empirical investigation. In fact, this line can be extended even further. It has been suggested by various physicists (e.g., Andrei Linde and Edward Harrison) that sufficiently

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technologically advanced cultures (e.g., aliens) might have the capability of generating artificial bubble universes. It seems in principle possible that suitably advanced technology might even allow the specification of some of the “natural” physical parameters inside such bubble universes, permitting generation of what would appear to anyone inside such a universe to be “cosmic fine-tuning.” Or things might go beyond even that. According to Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde, If I create an inflationary universe with a small density, I can prepare the universe in a particular state. . . . [I]f I am preparing a universe in some peculiar state, I can send [a] message encoded in the laws of physics. . . . Let us imagine that someone made our universe as a message. . . . To send a long message, you must make a weird universe with complicated laws of physics. . . . The only people who can read this message are physicists. Since we see around us a rather weird universe, does it imply that our universe was created not by God, but by a physicist-hacker? I don’t entirely think of this possibility as a joke.50

There seems to be no a priori reason for thinking that creatures developed within such a bubble universe (perhaps as an intended result of specification of various of the bubble’s physical parameters) would of necessity simply be unable to determine the artifactual status of their universe. Indeed, the higher the capabilities of those generating the bubble, the greater the possibility of those developing inside the bubble having the capabilities necessary to empirically determine the artifactuality and the designedness of their “cosmos.” Thus, so long as the potential cosmic artisans are technologically advanced but natural (in some broad sense), the position that our nature is deliberately, intelligently designed and that empirical investigation can perhaps reveal or establish that fact, is in principle scientifically legitimate. That means that the ideas both of design as such and of design’s empirical investigability as such are scientifically perfectly legitimate, and need have no immediate religious overtones at all, either when applied to significant portions of what we are accustomed to thinking of as the “natural” realm or even to our entire universe. Thus, attempts to prohibit application of the concept of design either to phenomena within nature or to nature itself, are simply mistaken. There might, of course, be all sorts of nasty problems in pursuing such investigation (e.g., problems with recognizing such design as design), but those are not necessarily principle problems. It is not at all clear what difference the identity of the artisan(s) should make. Whether something is designed, who/what the designer(s) might be, and whether or not the designer is supernatural are quite distinct issues. It cannot be seriously maintained that one cannot legitimately admit within science that something is designed unless one either knows or assumes that the designer is not supernatural. One cannot seriously maintain that one

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could not identify a Martian bulldozer as a product of deliberate design unless one knew enough about the designer to know that he or she or it or they or whatever was natural. It is perfectly obvious that a supernatural being, if there are any, could plunk a directly, miraculously created bulldozer down on the surface of Mars. No human Mars landing team stumbling across it would have to pretend not to be able to tell that that bulldozer was a designed entity until and unless that supernatural possibility had been eliminated. Therefore, even if it does turn out to be illegitimate to explicitly consider the supernatural within science, empirically determinably designed phenomena could still be scientifically legitimately recognized as designed even if their designer was in fact supernatural.51 Or alien. Or a tipsy British crop-circle prankster. Methodological naturalism or some other design prohibition may be a good provisional, pragmatic strategy, as even Bacon and Boyle would agree, but to try to wield it as a design conversation-stopper within science seems to leap well beyond any justification it can muster, any track record it can cite, and any future promise it can seriously make. Indeed, a doctrinaire employment of methodological naturalistic prohibitions on what one is permitted qua scientist to think, may ultimately work to the detriment not only of free exploration within science but also of genuine understanding even of the empirical realm around us. The current popularity of such prohibition attempts makes a remark of cosmologist Andrei Linde in a different context especially worth pondering: A healthy scientific conservatism usually forces us to disregard all metaphysical subjects that seem unrelated to our search. However, in order to make sure that this conservatism is really healthy, from time to time one should take a risk to abandon some of the standard assumptions. This may allow us either to reaffirm our previous position, or to find some possible limitation of our earlier point of view.52

Taking that risk demands some courage, especially in the contemporary herdlike secular academic cultural climate. But real commitment to genuinely understanding reality has never been for the timid.

NOTES 1. Part of this chapter also appeared in “Saturation, World Ensembles, and Design,” Special issue, Faith and Philosophy, no. 5 (2005); “Proceedings of the RussianAnglo American Conference on Cosmology and Theology, Notre Dame,” 667–86. I have also discussed some of the issues and points addressed in this chapter in a number of other places, including “Design: What Scientific Difference Could It Make?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 14–25.

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“Intelligent Design: What Does the History of Science Really Tell Us?” in Scientific Explanation and Religious Belief, ed. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt, (Tubingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 126–49; “How Not to Critique Intelligent Design Theory,” Ars Disputandi (2005), at www.arsdisputandi.org/; “Design and Its Critics: Monologues Passing in the Night,” review of Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics by Robert Pennock in Ars Disputandi (2002); and most particularly “Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and ‘Turtles All the Way Down,’” Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 4 (October 2004): 436–55; and other writings mentioned below. 2. The story here is significantly more complicated than usually portrayed—it was not a simple case of design being blindsided by Darwin. See my “Intelligent Design: What Does the History of Science Really Tell Us?” in Scientific Explanation and Religious Belief, ed. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt (Tubingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 126–49. 3. Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the Rainbow,” (lecture, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Mich., October 11, 1999). 4. I do find fine-tuning cases to be pretty powerful, but those cases have been produced almost exclusively outside the IDM. There may also be biological cases that are compelling, but not, I think, in the way IDM advocates think. See my “Perceiving Design” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil Manson (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 124–44. 5. Review of Of Pandas and People by Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education (NCSE) Reports (Jan/Feb,1990): 18. 6. For instance, Norman F. and Lucia K. B. Hall, “Is the War between Science and Religion Over?” The Humanist (May/June 1986): 26–27. 7. As my colleague Stephen Wykstra has pointed out in a personal communication, some historical thinkers (e.g., Robert Boyle) argued that nature itself might have different characteristics in a theistic rather than a nontheistic universe, and thus limiting science to the natural would not necessarily be equivalent to science proceeding as if philosophical naturalism were correct. That distinction is usually missed in discussions of methodological naturalism. 8. Eugenie Scott, “Darwin Prosecuted,” Creation/Evolution, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 42–47. 9. The difficulties may be significantly less than meets the eye for reasons I have developed elsewhere. See my Nature, Design, and Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). 10. Ruse, “Methodological Naturalism Under Attack,” in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, ed. Robert Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 365–66. 11. Ruse, “Methodological Naturalism,” 365. 12. Murphy, “Philip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin,” in Intelligent Design Creationism, 451–69. Originally in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45, no. 1 (1993): 26–36. 13. Scott, “Creationism, Ideology, and Science,” Annals of the NY Academy of Science 775 (June 24, 1996): 518. 14. This is linked to the widely accepted failure of proposed demarcation criteria. 15. Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life (Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1982), 2.

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16. Max Planck, “Religion and Natural Science,” in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (London: Norgate, 1950), 177. In this connection, see the contribution to this volume by David Van Baak. 17. Paul Davies, Are We Alone? (New York: Basic, 1995), 138. 18. Einstein is quoted as asking, “What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?” in The Quarks and Captain Ahab, ed. Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8. 19. Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honorable Defeat (New York: Penguin, 2001), 170. 20. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 131. 21. See George Douglas Campbell, “What Is Science?” in Good Words (April 1885): 244. 22. For brief discussion, see my Science and Its Limits (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 77. 23. For more on this topic, see my “Design, Chance, and Theistic Evolution,” in Mere Creation, ed. W. Dembski (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 289–312. 24. Robert Boyle, A disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural things; wherein it is inquir’d Whether, And (if at all) with what Cautions, a naturalist should admit them? (London: Printed by H. C. for John Taylor, at the Ship in St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1688), 237. 25. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 2d bk., 7, para. 7, 119. 26. Robert Pennock, “Naturalism, Evidence, and Creationism: The Case of Philip Johnson,” in Intelligent Design Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 90. 27. Thomas Huxley, “The Origin of Species,” Collected Essays, vol. 2, Darwiniana (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 52. This is a reprint of a review of Origin of Species, Westminster Review 17 (April 1860): 541–70. 28. A fair number of vocal scientists reject the idea of there being any area of reality for which science is not competent. As one example, see Peter Atkins, “Awesome versus Adipose,” Free Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Spring 1998), at www.secularhumanism .org/index.php?section=library&page=atkins_18_2 (accessed December 17, 2008). 29. Richard Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1987), 317. 30. Matthew Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh, “Biology Remystified: The Scientific Claims of the New Creationists,” in Intelligent Design Creationism, 297. 31. Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988), 301. 32. Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1995), 169. 33. Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business (New York: Washington Square, 1982), 134. 34. Robert Pennock, “Reply: Johnson’s Reason in the Balance,” in Intelligent Design Creationism, 104. 35. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book Review 44, no. 1 (January 9, 1997): 31. 36. See Darwin’s 1860 letter to Asa Gray, in Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), 249. 37. Lee Smolin, Life in the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45.

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38. Think of Freeman Dyson’s famous observation that it is as though in some sense the universe knew that we were coming (Dyson, Infinite in All Directions [New York: Harper & Row, 1988], 298) or Fred Hoyle’s comment about the possibility of a superintellect “monkeying” with the physics (Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20 [1982]: 16). 39. Quoted in Walter Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” Touchstone (July/Aug 1990): 75. 40. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 343–44. 41. Some—for example, Martin Reese, Lee Smolin, David Deutsch—have held that empirical evidence of other universes is possible. In this connection, John Leslie says, “Strong evidence for something . . . is whatever causes a puzzlement which the existence of that something would reduce or remove” in Leslie, Universes (New York: Routledge, 1989), 194. In that sense, the existence of other worlds might “explain” the fine-tuning of this one. By that same principle the fine-tuning of our world would constitute empirical evidence for supernatural design as well. 42. Leslie, Universes, 30. 43. Richard Swinburne, “Prior Probabilities in the Argument from Fine-tuning,” special issue, Faith and Philosophy 22, no. 5 (2005): 651. 44. Ernam McMullin, “Indifference Principle and Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24, no. 3 (1993): 359. 45. Paul Davies, Are We Alone? 121. 46. Edward Harrison, Masks of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 252. 47. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, in The Works of Robert Boyle, 3, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 273. 48. For additional discussion of difficulties, see my “Saturation, World Ensembles, and Design,” in “Proceedings of the Russian-Anglo American Conference on Cosmology and Theology, Notre Dame,” special issue, Faith and Philosophy 22, no. 5 (2005): 667–86. 49. For additional discussion, see my “Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and ‘Turtles All the Way Down’” Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 4 (October 2004): 436–55. 50. Andrei Linde, Wired, 3.07, July 1995. Linde has made the same suggestion other places as well. See, for example, John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Broadway, 1996), 101. 51. I have discussed this issue in more detail in “Design: What Scientific Difference Could It Make?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 14–25. 52. “Inflation, Quantum Cosmology, and the Anthropic Principle,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, ed. J. D. Barrow, P. C. W. Davies, and C. L. Harper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 449.

III TRUTH TELLING AND TRUTH SEARCHING

5 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West: Josiah Royce and American Memory1 Ronald A. Wells

WHY ARE WE INTERESTED IN THIS SUBJECT? WHAT IS AT STAKE? No one ever studied history. We study the past. The past is what happened, but it is the world we have lost. History is our telling of the past. We can neither know nor tell all of the past so we select aspects of it that we believe are the key aspects. History, then, is our construction of other people’s lives, and we do that from where we stand, from our time. Doing history is always a dialogue between the present and the past. Sometimes we ask our questions of the past, while other times we invite the past to speak to our time and place. Over the past fifteen or twenty years, I have been interested in certain questions. They coalesce around a central question that is expressed best by the title of a recent book to which I contributed a chapter: The Politics of Past Evil.2 In that anthology, a group of scholars asked how societies and peoples that had experienced violence and civil discord were able to work through the conflicts of the past—and differing memories of them—to ask for forgiveness and to move forward to peace. Part of the answer lies in the ability of one or both communities in the historic conflict to be able to ask for forgiveness from the other. This must be preceded by a willingness to make confession for past wrongs. In this chapter, I look again at the conquest of the American West. We are helped to focus our reevaluation by using the seminal work of the historian and moral philosopher Josiah Royce. His classic—but largely ignored—work was published in 1886. It gives us an insight into the way in which conflicted histories can be negotiated and “the politics of past evil” 81

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can be addressed. Royce confronts directly one of the main heroes in the winning of the West. John C. Frémont, sometimes called the pathfinder, was instrumental in gaining California and much of the southwest for the United States. He was the first candidate for president offered by the newly formed Republican Party in 1856. Royce’s work also is vital because it anticipates and essentially confronts the work of the most important and influential historian of the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner’s famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to be discussed below, laid down an approving line of argument about the frontier that informed much of American thinking about “movin’ West.” In short, Royce’s moral history of the conquest offers us today a kind of case study in examining how history has been used to create a national mythology that justifies the creation of the American empire. It also shows us, by contrast, how history can also be redeemed if we put multiple stories, confession, and justice as the central concerns.

THE IMPORTANCE OF JOSIAH ROYCE’S CALIFORNIA FOR OUR TIME In the mid-1980s, two books appeared that were important in reorienting public discourse about the past and the future of American life: Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart3 and Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest.4 Later, two groups of scholars evaluated these books, and the authors were given an opportunity for response. In both cases the celebrated authors wrote of their own surprise in acknowledging that they had had a nineteenth-century scholar in the back of their minds when writing their books but had not said so. They both stated their previously unacknowledged debt to Josiah Royce. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues reached back to that incomparable observer of America—Alexis de Tocqueville—to discuss what the core American belief in individualism had done to American values and beliefs. When a noted group of Catholic scholars critiqued Habits, and one of them suggested the salience of Josiah Royce to the discussion about individualism and community,5 Bellah responded, I was embarrassed to discover that our own memory had lapsed in that the authors of Habits did not credit Royce with the terms “community of memory” and “community of hope” which play a central role in our argument. Royce was in the background of several of us but we did not return to him in the period when we were writing Habits.6

In Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick accomplished a signal success in collapsing the intellectual world given us by Frederick Jackson

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Turner who had seen a discontinuity between the culture-shaping time of the frontier and our own time. Rather, Limerick insisted, there were and are fundamental continuities between that time and ours in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and economics. When Limerick reflected on her work two years after the book’s publication7—in the context of an evaluation of Legacy by a blue-ribbon group of scholars—she admitted some “failings” in Legacy: “Perhaps most embarrassing [was] the unacknowledged, uncited status of Josiah Royce. In a number of ways, Legacy is an argument for awarding Royce his deserved status as the father of western history.”8 The purpose here is not to fault Bellah and Limerick, but one observes that when two prominent intellectuals write important books, and later both are embarrassed not to have acknowledged their debts to Josiah Royce, we know we are on to something worthwhile about the importance of Royce’s work for our own time. Moreover, as we focus on Royce’s seminal work on California history, we join with others in seeking the wisdom he might offer by looking again at Royce’s challenge to his own time. As we seek, with Kevin Starr and others, to sort out the various meanings for us of the California founding time, we do well to listen again to a writer who combined criticism of, and admiration for, what was to become the California dream in the American mind.9 Our rereading of a classic text like Royce’s can help us in the project of deconstructing—and reconstructing—American memory.

JOSIAH ROYCE’S CALIFORNIA: A STUDY OF AMERICAN CHARACTER Josiah Royce, a young instructor at Harvard University, published a book in 1886 that was among the first serious histories of California. It has influenced the imaginations of those who would interpret the meaning of the American phase of western and California history. It is the kind of history one might expect from a moral philosopher. Moreover, it presages by a century our concerns with the whole genre of studies on history and memory, which is what makes it so fascinating. It has a long nineteenth-century title that no scholar would use today: California, From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (hereafter we will simply call it California). Royce had not intended to be a historian of California. He was chosen because the intended author for the California volume in The American Commonwealth series died suddenly. The editor at Houghton Mifflin, Horace Scudder, moved to fill the gap quickly, by talking with friends in academic and business communities of Cambridge and Boston. He soon came upon Royce, who had come to Harvard as a one-year replacement for William James.

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James said in a letter to a friend that he was enjoying the company of Royce “who is just thirty years old and [a] perfect little Socrates for wisdom and humor.”10 This little Socrates was chosen for the series not because he was an academically trained historian of California but because he was available through Harvard connections and because he was a native Californian. He was to make a major name for himself as a moral philosopher, teaching at Harvard for thirty years and writing more than a score of books and many articles in philosophy. While it is his role as historian that interests us here, we cannot take Royce’s historical work out of the context of his larger efforts in philosophy.11 Though not trained in history, Royce did his research and writing with the concerns of a scholar, with meticulous attention to detail and documentation. In fact, he later told a friend that writing history was much more difficult than writing philosophy because in history one had to stick to empirical reality.12 Not only did he think and write like a scholar, he had the good fortune of having had nearly unlimited access to the library of Hubert Howe Bancroft. That library was to be the foundation for the Bancroft Library at the University of California. Bancroft is credited for having written, along with his assistants, the monumental achievement of a multivolume history of California, matched only in our time by the work of Kevin Starr. Royce finished his more limited book before Bancroft, and Royce gave Bancroft full credit in California. In sum, Royce was not only good as a scholar, he was lucky as a researcher to have Bancroft’s help. Moreover, he was unique in being the first scholar, lucky or otherwise, to write on the state who was himself a native Californian. He brought an intuitive feel to the subject and a passion born out of his desire to see the moral significance of the new land of his birth. He was also unique in another respect: in researching California, Royce asked his mother to write her memoirs of being a forty-niner, which she probably would not have written without her son’s request. Because of it, Royce wrote a better book, and we have one of the best accounts of pioneer life from a woman’s perspective. A generation later, Yale historian Ralph Henry Gabriel edited and introduced what Sarah Bayliss Royce had called her “Pilgrimage Journey.”13 Royce’s sense for early California life was born out of a deep curiosity about his native town, Grass Valley, which was itself only about a halfdozen years older than Royce. His early experiences in the Sierra Nevada were to fill him with wonder about the nature of society itself: My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner’s grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. . . . The logs and

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graves looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life’s business was to find out what all this wonder meant.14

It was from an early age, he later recalled, that his ideas about the nature of persons and society in community were formed: I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only gradually come into my consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains.15

The great world would, of course, be very large indeed under the scrutiny of this mind of colossal energy, but, he always tried to balance the particular and the universal, or, as he was later to say, the provincial and the great community. Royce’s personal interest in the history of California was lifelong. Although he did not write professionally about California after 1891, the whole of his philosophical work was part his working out the failure of, and the need for community in his native California. For Royce the philosopher, abstract ideas came to life only in the realities of life as lived. As he developed philosophical positions on loyalty, provincialism, and the great community, California was never far from Royce’s mind. If there was one single point to be distilled from Royce’s California and from his other work, it is that humans cannot escape social duties. As Patricia Nelson Limerick was later to write in Legacy of Conquest, “The cruel but common lesson of western history: postponements and evasions catch up with people.”16 In the strictest professional sense, Royce stayed with California history from 1884 to 1891. One recent historian, reviewing the historiography of the Gold Rush, considerably overstates his case in a way that dismisses Royce and disrespects the moral discourse for which Royce stood. About Royce’s California, this scholar patronizes Royce as follows: “He lectured the young state of California about its moral shortcomings in the tone of an understanding but disappointed father. The lecture over, Royce returned once more to the study of philosophy.”17 In fact, Royce began research in Bancroft’s library in 1884 and stopped writing directly about California history in 1891 only when his several publishers—Robert Underwood Johnson, Millicent Shinn, and Horace Scudder—told him that the reading public had had enough of his meticulous work, especially on John C. Frémont.

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I have read all of Royce’s writings on California. I have also read his personal letters in manuscript form in the archives at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, some of which were later collected and published by John Clendenning. His writings and his letters, taken together, reveal a man who may have begun his work on California in a relatively light-hearted spirit, possibly unaware of the enormity of the task ahead, but they also reveal a person who matured as a scholar and a moral observer of society in the process. In the story of California, he saw the triumph that others had seen but saw tragedy too; he saw the heroism that other writers saw but treachery too; he joined with others in celebrating the best in American character as shown in early California, but he also saw the worst and was unafraid to say so. Because he could get past simple polarities about the moral aspects of early California life, Royce received much criticism, and he engaged in a fairly bitter battle for historical truth concerning the years 1846–1856, and he would have continued it if necessary. What strikes one in reading Royce’s California and his many journalistic pieces in the battle of words that followed the book’s publication, is his responsible, careful, and nuanced writing, as compared to what his letters indicate of how he really felt about it. His letters reveal a person who is shocked, even appalled at times, both by the story of early California history itself, but even more so by the attempted cover-up of odious aspects by the participants and their descendants. In reviewing the documentary evidence in Bancroft’s personal library, Royce began to give intellectual order to a pattern of social arrogance and carelessness he saw emerging. There was also the problem of the historical record being willfully distorted or muted, either by the historical actors themselves or more typically by relatives and friends who wished to portray a decent, even heroic, past when dispute and dishonor also needed to be admitted. Some scholars of this subject trace to Royce’s own unhappy childhood and school days his disinclination to allow a heroic, manifest destiny type of narrative to stand. It is alleged that, somewhere down deep in Royce’s soul, he thoroughly disliked those who caused social exclusion or who bullied weaker people.18 One does not know what to make of psychological explanations for Royce’s work, other than that they seem plausible; whether or not persuasive is another matter. In any event, Royce was a moral social analyst who decried injustice. Moreover, he became downright angry with those who lied about and tried to cover up the injustices they had perpetrated. Many subsequent scholars, even those sympathetic to Royce, believe he overdid it, both in terms of his verbosity and of his seemingly relentless (some would say obsessive) pursuit of the legend of John C. Frémont. As to the first point, any modern reader would question Royce on his verbiage. Where one word would do, he used two. Several of his editors at the time

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asked him to delete parts of his works. It seems he was the same way in person. If one asked Royce a question, all the available space was filled by the answer, leaving many questioners sorry they had asked.19 Royce was nothing if not thorough, but he seems not to have mastered the difference between thoroughness and verbosity. Thus, we are not alone in seeking Royce’s wisdom in a leaner form. The other charge, that Royce went way over the top in his pursuit of Frémont, for example, is not so easy to concede. In the end, I think we must sympathize with Royce; even if he wrote too much on the Frémont legend, that legend, as Royce lamented, would not go down, despite the facts of the case. This chapter, then, risks joining Royce in possible overemphasis on the Frémont affair, but since it is crucial—both to later interpreters of California and to Royce’s credibility in our eyes—we must follow the letter trail on this matter. We will detail below some of the pertinent facts relating to the Frémont controversy, but for now a few words will suffice. Captain John C. Frémont, a well-known explorer, was in California in 1845–1846. When the hostilities of the Mexican War began to impinge on California, Frémont associated himself with a group of Americans along the Sacramento River who were restive under Mexican control, and the Bear Flag revolt began. The question, in 1846 and when Royce wrote forty years later, was this: on what orders did Frémont act? Because the policy of the United States was to welcome the Californios (Royce calls them native Californians), not antagonize them, the conquest set in place an unfortunate pattern of racial-ethnic relations in California that was difficult to overcome. Royce, as a moral philosopher, deplored that pattern. The Frémont legend was, and is, vital to California history: if Frémont was right, that he acted on orders, then Californians must rightly regard him as their hero; if he had no orders, and his actions poisoned ethnic relations, then he is the villain in the piece. Frémont was, after all, the first Republican candidate for president, and he had a considerable reputation based on his early California career. When Josiah Royce began his research for California in the summer of 1884, he had access to Bancroft’s unique library of documents, memoirs, and newspapers. It soon became obvious to Royce that things did not look good for Frémont. Cautious and scholarly as he was, Royce wondered if there was an alternative interpretation than what seemed to be developing in his mind. As it turned out, a friend of his from Berkeley undergraduate days—William Carey Jones, later to be a founder of legal studies at Berkeley—was also a nephew of Frémont on his mother’s side. Jones agreed to set up an interview between Royce and Frémont, and Royce sent Jones the sorts of questions he wanted to ask (by then, General) Frémont. Royce was deferential, saying that he need not even bother the aged hero if documentary evidence could point to that which would satisfy Royce’s

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questions.20 The Frémonts preferred an interview, which occurred in early December 1884 at the Frémont home in New York. Royce spoke with General Frémont and his wife, Jessie, the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who had been a prominent figure in antebellum politics. Because of Royce’s access to Bancroft’s documents, he had obtained a copy of an 1846 dispatch from Secretary of State Buchanan to Thomas Larkin, the American consul at Monterey in the 1840s. The document was vitally important because it disclosed both the American policy in California and who was in charge of it. The policy of the Polk Administration was clearly designed to bring California into the Union, but Larkin was to ensure the harmony of that desire with the good feelings of the Californios. Larkin, then, was the government’s secret agent in California, not Frémont, and the policy was peaceful persuasion toward the Mexican population. During the interview, Royce kept quiet about the Larkin dispatch in his pocket. The Frémonts insisted that no such dispatch existed and that Larkin could never have been trusted by Polk for such a delicate assignment. They insisted that Frémont was the government’s man in California.21 A recent biographer of Frémont will not directly admit that Royce had the goods on Frémont; rather he chose to attack Royce. Regarding the infamous “Larkin dispatch,” the biographer writes, “Royce perversely did not reveal that [he] had copied such a telltale document.”22 While there is little doubt in Royce’s written account of the interview that he thoroughly enjoyed catching the great pathfinder lying, keeping silent does not necessarily reveal perversity but caution. Royce realized two things: that for a young scholar to deconstruct the Frémont legend would occasion stiff opposition, so he had to be careful, and, part of that care was to verify his documents. The one he had in his pocket was a copy of one of Bancroft’s copies. He believed he needed to see the original before going public with it. In the early spring of 1885, Royce made a quick research trip to Washington, D.C. He went to the State Department, and after some negotiations over what today we would call national security issues, Royce was able to see the original Larkin dispatch. By mid-April 1885, Royce knew what he had to do. On April 14, he wrote his publisher, Horace Scudder, and a key assistant in the Bancroft enterprise, Henry Oak, to tell the news.23 The originals in Washington finally and fully confirmed what they all had thought, that is, that the documents in Bancroft’s possession were not only true and accurate, but all that there was on the subject. Frémont was now doubly damned: not only was Larkin surely the only agent and the policy of peace toward the Californios the government’s only policy, there were no instructions to Frémont at all. Royce now believed, as he told Oak, that he could apply “the thumb-screw” to the Frémonts in a way he could not have done when he had seen only Bancroft’s copy. Even so, Royce was a cautious

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scholar and wanted to give the Frémonts another chance to exonerate themselves. On the same day, April 14, 1885, he wrote Jessie Benton Frémont, disclosing what he had found in Washington, saying that the documentary evidence did not seem to support the General’s view of events on the Sacramento River in 1846. Royce repeated that he wanted to do justice to the Frémonts, and he urgently requested them to reveal their secrets just as the government in Washington had done.24 In the summer of 1885, Royce made another visit to the Frémonts. He later reported to Henry Oak in Berkeley what had transpired. Royce pleaded with the Frémonts for something new from them that would shed a different light on the Bear Flag Affair now that the government’s secrets were out. The conversation was cordial, Royce wrote, with the General “dignified and charming,” and Mrs. Frémont “calm, sunny and benevolent.” In the face of the facts, Royce told Oak, Frémont “lied, lied unmistakably, unmitigatedly, hopelessly. And that was his only defence [sic].”25 Even so, Royce tried yet again to find a way of escape for the Frémonts. Already to Oak, Royce had given some wiggle space, suggesting that the problem was not so much with events as with the General’s memory of them (“that his memory and not his design is now the deceiver”).26 Royce wrote once again to Jessie Frémont, suggesting, though not in so many words, an honorable way for the General to be let off the hook. With his book nearly finished now, Royce asked Mrs. Frémont, “How shall I explain these facts consistently with General Frémont’s present memory?”27 Significantly for our story, Jessie Benton Frémont never replied to Royce’s letter. Royce’s California was published in 1886, causing quite a stir among those interested and involved in the early history of California and in the reputations made in those years. Royce was surprised by the virulence of the attacks on him and his book and the friendships it would cost him; he was equally surprised at the lengths he would have to go to defend what he had written. We now take a few pages to summarize the actual contents of the book, it is enough for now to say that Josiah Royce’s venture into the waters of California history was far stormier that he had imagined it would be. It is not so much that he was naive, as one historian has recently charged28 but that the issues he raised were—and are—troublesome to those who care about California history. Royce’s book, in the end, allows us to begin to see an alternative narrative for the early history of California.

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF CALIFORNIA Royce’s California revealed his independent mind. Of himself he said, “Because I am a Californian [I am] little bound to follow mere tradition.”29 In

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fact, his rendition of early California history flew in the face of a traditional American, that is, manifest destiny, viewpoint. Royce wanted his history to be more than merely a factual recounting of early days; he was interested in the events of history for themselves but even more so for “their value as illustrating American life and character.”30 That paradoxical character was displayed, as Royce saw it, on the one hand as careless, hasty, and blind to social duties; on the other hand as “cheerful, energetic, courageous and teachable”(2). Royce does not really doubt a certain inevitability about the eventual American conquest, nor, in his view, did the Californios. What the latter feared was the coming of bad Americans. The good American, to Mexicans and to Royce, is represented by Thomas Larkin, who was “the only American official who can receive nearly unmixed praise” for his work in California (38). The bad American is represented by John C. Frémont. For Royce, history was not to be a happy patriotic story. Rather, he wrote the book “to serve the true patriot’s interest in a clear self-knowledge and in the formation of sensible ideals of national greatness” (49). California, therefore, is the true parent of Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, for in it Royce sees that conquest is indeed the right word, and that the attitudes of conquest continued after 1846. Those attitudes, Royce insisted, which the American “national character made us assume towards the Californians at the moment of our appearance among them as conquerors, we have ever since kept, with disaster to them, and not without disgrace and degradation to ourselves” (49). The author then proceeds to the lengthy and detailed analysis of John C. Frémont’s various escapades. Royce is particularly hard on the leaders of the Bear Flag uprising, especially Robert Semple and William B. Ide. Royce mounts the evidence against Frémont and finds his actions wanting in moral character; at one point saying they amounted to “atrocity” (135). Nevertheless, Royce ends the Frémont section with a magnanimity and grace beyond the judgementalism that some historians think Royce evidences. He says he cannot fully fathom “what inner motives” drove Frémont, yet Royce knows that Frémont’s actions were disastrous for the nation because they put an enmity between the American and the Californian. The very basis of the state reveals this uneasy conscience about the conquest, Royce insists. The lines most quoted by scholars and journalists from California are these: “The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in public as a pure aggressor . . . The American wants to persuade not only the world, but himself, that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he has determined to get” (151). While Royce would have no part in such hypocrisy, he would not judge all Californians. He rather preferred noting the irony that while the Mexican War had come to be regarded with “shame and contempt,” the acquisition of California

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continued to be regarded as “a God-fearing act . . . [and part of] our devotion to the cause of freedom” (156). In this respect, Royce hoped his book would be a reminder and a guide for the future: So that when our nation is another time about to serve the devil, it will do so with more frankness, and will deceive itself less by half-conscious cant. For the rest, our mission in the cause of liberty is to be accomplished through a steadfast devotion to the cultivation of our own inner life, and not by going abroad as missionaries, as conquerors, or as marauders among weaker peoples. (156)

The singular injustice perpetrated by Frémont and Commander Sloat was the second conquest of the Californios in 1847, thereby sealing an ineradicable division between Anglo and Mexican Californians. When the Californios resented, sometimes resisted, all this, they came to be seen by Americans as rebels and traitors, which, Royce thought, forged “one more link in the fatal chain of injustice” (194). The Gold Rush is portrayed within Royce’s overall thesis of order and disorder. With thousands of new settlers arriving in 1849–1850, the new state was subjected to further scenes of racism and antiforeign feeling. Drawing from his own family’s difficult trek to California in 1849, Royce noted the religious aura often associated with arrival in California and the consequent attitude of high expectations among the new settlers. They hoped for, even expected, a great deal, so that when foreigners got in their way there was often violent reaction. Royce regards such actions as a disgrace to American ideals of liberty and fairness. So-called miner’s justice was more than disgraceful; it retarded social maturity in the Anglo-American community by instilling a kind of thinking that quick, unambiguous justice could be had cheaply. Royce’s passion shows clearly when he described the easy operation of lynching juries in convicting a “greaser” on little evidence: “One could see his guilt, so plainly, we know, in his ugly, swarthy face, before the trial began . . . And if he was a native Californian, a born ‘greaser,’ then so much the worse for him” (363–64). Yet, despite the passion, or perhaps because of it, Royce marvels at the way in which mining communities could learn from this “inner social disease” and begin the process of renewal within a generation. They were, in the end, able to found real communities, that is, in his terms, to move “from social foolishness to social steadfastness” (375). In Royce’s discussion of San Francisco’s first ten years, we find “dramatic incidents that belong to the painful side of the struggle for order” (378). He contradicts thoroughly an early version of pioneer mythology that reveled in the “wicked” history of the city. To the contrary, the legend of gambling men and easy women were “but the froth on the turbid current” (398). The transient quality of early San Francisco life did indeed leave the

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stain of individuality that forsook social duty, but that was overcome by institutions of a conservative character, especially churches and families that showed people their social duty. The committees of vigilance were, of course, of great concern to the early history of San Francisco, and once again Royce goes right to the heart of the matter. There was a great deal of crime and corruption in the early 1850s. Royce does not so much blame the obviously guilty malefactors (e.g., the fraud, Henry Meiggs) as the complacency of society for not making social responsibility a top priority. In the famous case of the murder of the reform-minded editor, James King of William by James Casey, Royce was the first scholar to see the significance of the social composition of the vigilance committee. It seems that “the best men” of San Francisco thwarted mob rule by asserting its own social and economic power. It was, as Royce noted, “[a] businessman’s revolution” (440). Royce’s final subject is the emotionally charged dispute over land titles. He wanted respect for the guarantees given the Californios at the time of the conquest. Most of the guaranteed land titles were not honored because of what Royce called “the rapacity” of “predatory disregard” by the Americans (467). The Land Act of 1851, according to Royce, only slightly dignified the wholesale movement of land from Californian to American hands. Worse yet, for Royce, was that the land manipulated away from the Californios did not end up in the hands of ordinary Americans but in the greedy hands of speculators and lawyers. This was, he says, to cause lasting injury to the whole state of California. In conclusion, Royce restates that California history is more than a local or regional concern. In his view, California in the 1850s was an immature society characterized by social irresponsibility; by people who “love mere fullness of life and lack reverence for the relations of life” (500). Finally, the community did find a kind of social salvation, but only because it learned the lessons it had heretofore “despised and forgotten.” For Royce, it was only by Californians’ confessing that past to each other that the way forward could be found.

ROYCE’S CALIFORNIA AND “THE NEW WESTERN HISTORY” There has been a sea change in the way we think about American history. It has happened in the past generation, and its consequences are still shaking American academic life. We should look into the new way of doing history to see how Royce’s insights have continuing salience. Among the vast literature about historical study there is one recent book that is singularly useful in demonstrating the ways in which history has

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changed. It is Telling the Truth about History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob.31 By “telling the truth” Appleby and her colleagues do not mean to imply that other, prior historians were telling lies. Rather, they mean that there was once a single narrative about American history that most Americans (African Americans and Native Americans excepted) accepted as part of their heritage. It was a story of achievement, of how a nation of immigrants made the first liberal democracy, and how that nation became the economic success story of modern world history. Appleby and her colleagues suggest that there is an increasing emphasis on diversity. When historians extend the range of American history beyond dominant groups, the historical picture changes. Moreover, there is a new emphasis on the standpoint of the historian her- or himself. Just as acknowledging the social location of historical subjects is important in getting a more fully orbed picture of reality, so is the intellectual location of the historian important in terms of the questions asked and the answers sought. As the Appleby team (importantly, three women), writes, “We routinely, even angrily, ask: whose history? Whose science? Whose interests are being served by these ideas and stories? The challenge is out to all claims of universality.”32 This idea—what we call “the social construction of knowledge”—has transformed how we think about the history of the American West. American history, in its academic, professional setting, grew up with the history of the West. In a path-breaking essay in 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”33 Frederick Jackson Turner articulated a vision for American history that has been hard to shake. While many important points can be adduced from Turner, two are vital: that American interaction with the frontier provided an essential way of understanding the development of democracy in America, and that the frontier closed about 1890, thus ending forever the most American phase of American history. Several generations of historians have reacted to Turner in a variety of ways. Most importantly for our purposes, the newer versions of western history ask different questions than did Turner and his followers. Today, we want to know the experience of women, natives, and other “outsiders” because we want to know a total history of the West, not just “how the West was won.” Moreover, the practitioners of this newer mode of historical discourse question the whole notion of conquest in moral terms. Instead of how the West was won, we look at the historic treatment of natives, nonwhites, women, and even the land itself, and we might ask how the West was abused, oppressed, and, some might even say, raped. This, in short, is a discussion of a different order. Larry McMurtry, the novelist, is mistaken to say that these new kinds of questions and histories amount to the “failure studies” of American Western history.34 The intense work of Patricia Limerick, Donald Worster, Clyde Milner, William Cronon, Richard White, Linda Schlissel, and others do indeed

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ask searching, even searing, questions about the triumphalist viewpoint that was taught in most American history texts until fairly recently. McMurtry may be right to remind us that some of the uncomfortable truths coming out in the new Western history have long been known, but, he vitiates his own point, and unintentionally vindicates Limerick and others in noting that Americans typically have not wanted “to receive bad news from out West.”35 In the end, McMurtry is doleful, asking, “Are our myths safe for a few more years, or must we westerners face up to living with nothing more stirring than our suburbs now that John Wayne is dead?”36 What is lost in the new story is not the real American West; that was always, as Woody Guthrie observed, “hard, ain’t it hard” for the people and the land. For McMurtry and others, what is lost is the West of the imagination. He reports having once noted sadness in his aged father’s eyes, a sadness begotten of having known the newness of the West and now to know that his children would never see it. While one does not belittle McMurtry’s wounded memory, the historians of the newer mode also see sadness in aged eyes, but they are those of the native people on marginal reservations and of the migrant workers picking fruits and vegetables in the Imperial Valley. The conquest was about them and their ancestors, and Patricia Nelson Limerick is surely right to call our attention to the unbroken links between the past and the present. The new western historians, especially Limerick, have been criticized from another direction, that they, especially she, have made too much of their own discovery of the tragic elements in western history. Especially forceful is the work of Forrest Robinson37 who often astonishes the careful reader in questioning the motives and integrity of Limerick. We have already noted that Limerick admitted to being embarrassed in acknowledging she had omitted explicit discussion of Royce’s California in her Legacy of Conquest. I prefer to take Limerick at her word, that she apologized for the oversight, and, if there would be a new edition of Legacy she would discuss Royce. Robinson, however, is not so sanguine. He notes that Limerick’s hope for a historian of the American West who could bring in the tragic element—as C. Vann Woodward had done for the South—and suggests that she ignored Royce in order to promote her own originality in that regard.38 How, one asks, does Robinson know this? While it is possible to concede that some of Limerick’s and Donald Worster’s early work was dismissive of prior historians, I do not recall them attacking another scholar the way Robinson does Limerick. Even Royce’s sustained attack on John C. Frémont was more generous that Robinson’s on Limerick. The concerns of McMurtry and Robinson, to be fair, are important to scholars and students who would look anew at the history of California. As McMurtry himself writes, it is the West in our heads that we cannot let go of, “the very explorers who began the destruction of the Garden could not bear to admit that the Garden had been destroyed.”39 Robinson celebrates

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Royce for going against the temper of his own time and for displaying the courage to confront triumphalist ideologies. The issue for this historian is not faulting Limerick and others for forgetting Royce but being glad that they remember him and his insights now; we can face the future more realistically because we have acknowledged the past more courageously. To directly speak to McMurtry’s lament, we need not give up all the stories of the past even as we acknowledge the more recently discovered stories of other actors in the California drama. We need not give up the stories of hardship, bravery, courage, and generosity now that we also know that there were, at least, equal measures of cowardice, treachery, greed, and ill-gotten luxury. Historian Richard Etulain has described with care and sensitivity the sorts of morally nuanced, socially complex and self-reflective stories that are needed for the new history to unite past and future generations.40 It was not Royce’s goal, nor should it be ours, to subvert one major narrative about the West in order to raise up another but to disclose the multiple nature of realities in the West and especially California. Kevin Starr, whose multivolume history of California has been previously mentioned, distinguishes himself once again in a recent article, as California’s preeminent historian. Even as he congratulates the recent historians for their new viewpoints, he asks that we not lose sight of what he calls “the founding time” of (American) California. In the context of the Gold Rush he concedes that it was not worth the cost of one Indian’s child’s life. He writes with both insight and deep feeling, “Would it be better that the Gold Rush never happened? Is that what we are saying? Is that what we are saying when we contemplate the tragic dimensions of experience? Would it be better that there were no California? That we not be here? Which is to say that America not be here?”41 Starr approvingly quotes Patricia Limerick, in her opening of the Gold Rush exhibit in Oakland, that human beings regularly do bad things. Starr, a practicing Catholic, invokes the JudeoChristian tradition by calling these bad things sins, which, when taken together, “constitute a grave burden on the present because these sins are now a part of our living history.”42 Starr still wants to affirm the good and socially useful aspects of early California history, but, for him, that affirmation must always be in tandem with an acknowledgement of “the sins of the fathers,” and a determination “that these sins are not being recommitted in our own time.” This is seen as California’s “experiencing a prophetic probe, for better or for worse, of the larger American experience.”43 At the end of the article in which these words are written, one finds a reproduction of a cartoon drawing of Josiah Royce reading from a very large text! As Robert Hine has suggested, Royce saw the history of the American West “as metaphysics,” in which society moves from the willfulness of individualism to the social cohesion of genuine community.44 The glue that holds the community together, and at the same time prevents collectivist statism, is

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what Royce called loyalty, a word probably better redefined in our time as “solidarity.” Some Roycean interpreters think this to be an essentially “religious” insight that has much to say about American values. Whether or not readers of California will agree with Royce’s religious insistence will, of course, depend upon how that person constructs the moral life. Kevin Starr, the redoubtable critic who is conscious of sin in California’s past presses us further: “And yet the moment we mention sin, we must also mention repentance, atonement, healing and forgiveness . . . But for all the tangled burden of the past . . . [California] is struggling toward redemption and the light.”45 Yet, despite Starr’s impressive litany of religious actions, there is one missing: confession. It is precisely here that Royce’s California is so compelling. Royce thought the early history of California to be of “divinely moral significance.” He wrote his history for “any fellow Californian who may perchance note the faults of which I make confession.”46 He shows a way of social salvation, of solidarity within a community; for Royce that was the only saving grace. Whether or not Kevin Starr is right—that with redemption the “Pacific City on the Hill” can still flourish47—is for future generations of Californians to determine. Royce neither condemns nor condones all actions in early California history. He, too, seeks the balance that McMurtry, Starr, and others are looking for: of not now emphasizing too much what Starr calls the dark side of California history and losing what McMurtry wants to retain—the West of the imagination. Royce’s California—a study of American character as the subtitle proclaims—is the type of book that can help us develop that fully orbed historical consciousness that any healthy and virtuous society needs.

NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter have appeared elsewhere: in an introduction to a new edition of Royce’s California (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2002) and in a heuristic article in Fides et Historia in 2003. “History and memory” is a bright, new field in the discipline of history, having its own journal of that name, published at Indiana University’s Center for the Study of History and Memory. This chapter originated as a lecture for the Calvin College Worldview Lectureship, but as a scholarly matter, it takes its cue from the large literature on history and memory, too voluminous to be listed here. Some of that literature can be accessed by visiting the website of the Center at Indiana University noted above. A celebrated scholar on the subject, whose work has illumined the possibilities of this new subfield, is David Blight of Yale University. His award-winning book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002) is already a classic. 2. Daniel Philpott, ed., The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

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3. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 4. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). 5. Frank M. Oppenheim, “A Roycean Response to the Challenge of Individualism,” in Beyond Individualism: Toward A Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America, ed. Donald L. Gelpi (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 87–119. 6. Gelpi, Beyond Individualism, 222. 7. Donald Worster et al., “The Legacy of Conquest by Patricia Nelson Limerick: A Panel of Appraisal,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989): 303–22. 8. Worster et al., “Legacy of Conquest,” 317. 9. Kevin Starr, America and the California Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 10. William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), 1:249. 11. For biographies of Royce, see especially John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, rev. ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999); Robert V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 12. John Clendenning, ed., The Letters of Josiah Royce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 178. 13. Ralph Henry Gabriel, ed., A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932). 14. Josiah Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 5. 15. Royce, Hope. 16. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 95. 17. Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 298. 18. Clendenning, Life and Thought, 32–38; Josiah Royce, California (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), xiii. 19. Clendenning, Life and Thought, 330–31. 20. Josiah Royce to William Carey Jones, September 23, 1884. Jones Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Hereinafter, letters will be noted by collection and “Berkeley.” 21. Clendenning, Letters, 141–45. 22. Andrew Rolle, John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 260. 23. Josiah Royce to Horace Scudder, April 14, 1885. Scudder Papers, Berkeley. Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, April 14, 1885. Oak Papers, Berkeley. 24. Josiah Royce to Jessie Frémont, April 14, 1885. Copy in Oak Papers, Berkeley. 25. Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, August 8, 1885. Oak Papers, Berkeley. 26. Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, August 8, 1885. 27. Josiah Royce to Jessie Frémont, August 20, 1885. Copy in Oak Papers, Berkeley. 28. Rolle, Frémont, 260.

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29. Josiah Royce, Fugitive Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 7. 30. Josiah Royce, California (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), vii (hereinafter all references to the book will appear parenthetically in the text, with the pages listed referring to the original 1886 edition). 31. Jocye Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1997). 32. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth, 9. 33. This famous essay is most conveniently found as the first chapter in Frederick Turner The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). 34. Larry McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” The New Republic (October 22, 1999): 32–38. 35. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 33. 36. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 32. 37. Forrest G. Robinson, The New Western History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 38. Robinson, New Western History, 80. 39. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 38. 40. Richard Etulain, “Western Stories for the Next Generation,” Western Historical Quarterly 31 (2002): 5–23. 41. Kevin Starr, “The Gold Rush and the California Dream,” California History 77 (Spring 1998): 58. 42. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 61. 43. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 66. 44. Hine, Josiah Royce, 166–85. 45. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 67. 46. Royce, California, 501. 47. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 67.

6 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place Mark Fackler

The Ghanian scholar George Ayittey titled his recent book on Africa, Continent in Chaos. He writes that Africa is a rich continent: natural resources, oil, diamonds, and manganese. It is a productive continent: cocoa, coffee, tea, and palm oil. Its beauty is fabulous: pristine ecology and unrivaled wildlife, but “paradoxically, a continent with such abundance and potential is inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. It is in the throes of a seemingly incurable crisis.”1 That observation deserves our attention. From lack of food security to political corruption to AIDS, from cost-prohibitive education to tribal conflict to decrepit health care delivery—at every level—this appears to be a lost continent. Supporting Ayittey, Peter Schwab called his book Africa, A Continent Self-Destructs. He writes, By the late 1970s and into the 80s and 90s, much of the continent had devolved into chaos. Little was left of the optimism that had permeated African leaders and Western academics in the first decades of independence, the 60s and 70s. Although many intellectuals including myself attempted to hold onto some enthusiasm, it really did seem apparent that Africa south of the Sahara had matriculated into a period in which pandemonium, war, predatory governments, disease, poverty, famine, and Western neglect were strikingly in ascendance. As the world entered the new millennium, sub-Sahara Africa had all but collapsed into anarchy and viciousness.2

The dimensions of this African problem are far-reaching and complex and provide many challenges for the world. Africa faces enormous economic challenges, presenting problems that I strongly suspect that world economic networks could afford to ignore. Africa provides challenges for 99

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the world in its political problems, not because of any obvious strategic importance, but because the porous borders of even pro-Western African nations are more and more open to gun traffic and malefactors. I prefer, however, to focus on another human problem to which this continent of chaos offers us wisdom, that is, the task of communicating with each other: telling stories, sorting out values, negotiating differences, solving problems, celebrating, connecting, improving, prospering, and growing. Our focus on communication leads us first to look at the fascinating development underway in sub-Sahara Africa, lest we miss an opportunity for our own development. In the West, we trust tools of technology to carry us along, often naively believing that technology is good as an end in itself; in the Southern Hemisphere generally, tools still serve the lively engagement of a first-order oral culture where the sound of the voice, as Walter Ong cogently described it, is still the sign of life.3 The central themes of African history are the achievement of human coexistence with nature and the building up of enduring societies. Humankind traces its earliest movement to the spread of peoples across the continent of Africa. John Iliffe notes that these “frontiersmen colonized an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human race.”4 The prehistory of these early societies includes the emergence of food-producing and gathering communities that tilled poor soils through unpredictable rainfall, insects, and disease. Agricultural and food-sharing cooperatives—early expressions of communitarian social behavior—first appeared in sub-Sahara Africa. Long before the atomistic individual of the Western Enlightenment was invented, people of conscience and selfreflection learned that survival required strategies of interdependence and mutual aid. In contrast, communitarian practice in North America is primarily associated with the marginalized enclave or utopian sect, and its theorizing has only recently generated a literature. Communitarian practice has been evident in Africa from the beginning. Neither empire nor individualism, writ large across Western history, has distracted Africans from the sense of mutuality and social interdependence that have been integral from the earliest expressions of their cultural development.

COMMUNICATION THEORY Technologies of mass media came to Africa with the missionaries and colonists. Empire, church, and commerce needed efficient means of message delivery. Africa’s first newspaper was established by the late 1920s. Broadcasting began for an African audience in the 1940s.5 The independence movements of the mid-1900s changed the way mass media were deployed—focusing on the complex social task of nation building. Kenya,

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for instance, found media an essential key to self-governance. Jomo Kenyatta came out of a British jail to lead the newly independent republic in 1963. He and other Kenyan leaders faced the daunting task of uniting tribal and language groups, some of whose territory extended across the 1885 boundaries established by European mapmakers. Kenya emerged from its independence struggle with an elected parliament dominated by the Kikuyu tribal group, with the best land still held by British farmers and nearly all businesses owned and operated by Asian merchants. More than fifty languages were heard within its tightly knit rural communities. Outside its two cities, people had little sense of national identity. In this context, mass media, especially radio, became the vehicle by which political constituencies were developed. Newspapers were more difficult to circulate and carried the literacy barrier but nonetheless were the effective mouthpiece of political elites.6 Elsewhere on the continent, mass media likewise played a strong and contentious role in national development.7 In Ghana, the first of Africa’s independent states, Kwame Nkrumah started the first national news agency, developed national radio broadcasting, and began a television service before his ouster in 1966. Nigerian political debate flourished immediately after independence, and media provided the venue for voices protesting oppression and appealing for support and foreign aid. However, the first wave of democratic politics, which involved competing parties no longer under colonial control, failed to move that country’s three major ethnic groups toward consensus. Through the various independence movements, media was employed to turn subjects into citizens.8 Kenyan media, established by the British and appropriated by Kenyan nationalists to use for the goal of winning independence, has not meant publishing freedom.9 Kenyan journalists are still subject to legal action for criminal libel, a sure sign of the fragile relationship between Western concepts of free speech and the African realities of political power.

A WESTERN VERSION In the West, the right to express the beliefs of conscience emanates from a doctrine of the individual as moral center. Responsibility and freedom are grounded in the individual. The Enlightenment taught us that dominion by decree, tyranny imposed from above, violates human value and dignity. The classical liberal theory of the press emerged in seventeenth-century Britain as John Milton wrote the famous Areopagitica, his defense of the right to freely express one’s conscience in an open marketplace of ideas. “Let truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”10 The “classical liberal theory of the press” arises

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out of Milton’s thought, but Milton did not give us that name. It comes from a small book written by three scholars at the University of Illinois in the mid-1950s. They titled their book Four Theories of the Press. This little book, which drew worldwide appeal, draws four paradigms representing the relationship of political power to public expression of conscience and thought.11 These scholars describe how Britain, where the modern press first appeared, went from an authoritarian model12 to a classical liberal theory articulated by Milton, John Lilburne, and the Puritan dissidents. One of the hallmarks of Western emancipation from feudalism and intellectual slavery was this brave democratic movement that held conscience higher than empire, and publication by voice, gesture, or technology a natural right. Most people in North America have lived happy and successful lives without ever hearing of this 1950s book. However, nearly every African student of communications and journalism has read or been lectured to from this little book. The freedom to speak one’s mind is something quite exciting, daring, and visionary in their context. In the West, stories of people who came to believe that the freedom to speak and publish are treated as history. This first-order right to freedom of expression, popular from the Medieval era to the Enlightenment, has been displaced by the perspective of postmodern theorizing. Grounding free speech in an appeal to human rationality would be considered quite oldfashioned today. In young democracies in Africa, however, the idea of free expression without punishment or fear of retribution is refreshingly new. In most African universities, writers and editors who have run for their lives or served prison terms for daring to speak up, to criticize, and to suggest reform walk into class. This is contemporary history. For example, in 2002, a reform coalition won national elections in Kenya, opening up press freedom to a point previously unknown. Yet, when I first taught there less than ten years earlier, I was told to be cautious. Some of the writers I was interviewing were the kind who would prompt police to knock on your door and escort you directly to the airport. Free speech is fragile. Even in the United States with our long tradition of First Amendment law, speech is tempered and suppressed and adjudicated constantly. Imagine the climate for free speech if a nation’s laws are not codified, if final decisions lay with a judiciary that serves at the will of the executive, and where tradition dictates that dissenters are presumptively criminals. Stephen Carter has argued that the way a nation treats dissenters is a barometer of its political and social well-being.13 This discovery of the open marketplace of ideas, largely rhetorical though it be, is quite exciting and now well known in African media studies. One can see creative and competent uses made of it to increase government accountability and to foster and promote indigenous development. In selected classrooms and even in newsrooms, one can feel the pulse of a young African mind discovering the power of creative thinking and writing, media

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making, and symbolic discourse. In broadcast studios, native language speakers are addressing national issues in a mother tongue. In Op-Ed pages, citizens urge their bureaucratic institutions toward reform.

DAZZLING TURNABOUTS In the West, technological prowess walks hand in hand with epistemological confusion. For example, we now face the colossal confusion surrounding acceptable restrictions on content based on notions of good and true. We lack an agreed-upon place to stand. This right of conscience to speak freely—to challenge tradition, to say what is on your mind, to build a media empire by whatever means you have, to advertise and sell with every persuasive skill you can muster, to entertain by appealing to a freely chosen appetite—the vision of a free individual speaking freely has run its course. The classical liberal theory of the press has come up short. In the West, we have learned that freedom to speak is not the final democratic truth but that freedom, too, needs boundaries if people, communities, and nations are to prosper and thrive. We now concede that sexually provocative speech has its limits, that speech advocating racial violence has limits, that unregulated commercial messages make victims out of buyers, and those politicians who lie can do irreparable harm to the community. We have now come to recognize that the open marketplace needs boundaries in the form of community norms or social values, or else speech becomes the contest of sophists and social trust dissolves.14 How do we make sense of this theoretically? We have been emancipated from the authoritarian model of the press and cannot go back, yet the liberal model has left us without capacity to draw boundary lines. Even as the ink on Four Theories of the Press was drying in the 1950s, the smoke from classical liberalism’s demise was filling the nostrils of intellectuals and media practitioners. The fourth and last of the four theories presented by the Illinois authors was the social responsibility theory. This theory called for a return to the notion that persons live in community and that community norms are important. The authors of Four Theories did not develop this communitarian notion nor perhaps even sense its power. However, the dozen people who fashioned this fourth theory, all members of Robert Hutchins’ Commission on Freedom of the Press, included the likes of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Their wider writings began to fill in the theoretical framework lacking in the earlier work.15 Others, too, sensing a real-world discovery that needed to be explored, have built on such concepts as care, the speech act bounded, and the reality of power—the need for all voices, not just those capable of owning a press or a transmitter.

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Without returning to the monarchial authoritarian theory or advocating the discredited communist-socialist theory, these movements in the last half century have struggled to define and defend a communitarian theory of the press, not a compromise between state power and personal freedom but a theory built on the recognition that freedom comes bounded by norms, and relationships precede individualized personhood. Theorizing about communications—its freedoms and responsibilities— needs a new start. We may find that start where technology is still young, and where humanity still talks. The African continent may experience sheer chaos, hurt by AIDS and violence, raped by corruption, and drained of brain power, yet this fragile, dusty continent, fertile for malaria and dysentery, may be the most fruitful place to look for intellectual foundations for deepening a communitarian theory of the press.

COMMUNICATION THEORY AND MEDIA FREEDOM Mining for intellectual foundations may take you to Athens, Paris, London, New York-Boston-Cambridge—but Addis Ababa? Kampala? Bujumbura? This journey sounds like it involves the wrong flight. In the West, the right to freely speak one’s conscience arose from the insight that humankind, created in God’s image, is morally conscious, self-aware, and holds in the soul the capacity to connect with others, to empathize, and to seek the divine. This grant underscored the inherent value of every person. Obviously, these ideas are contested today. Pluralism long ago called into question the legitimacy of any one set of theological convictions presumed to be the only authentic set. Humanism, pragmatism, postmodernity, and even sociobiology proposed alternate readings of the human person. Empiricism challenged any theory that could not be verified by repeatable observation or measurement. Therein lies the tale. Does the global community today have any commonly accepted notion of who we are? Today a person’s moral claim to worth rides on a continuum between economic capacity and a generic, free-floating appeal to dignity. African theological reflection offers a possible way out of this dilemma. It fixes human worth at a different point than the West and interprets the image as a grant of essential human relatedness. The Nigerian scholar Ogbonnaya argues that divine essence is communal, and thus being made in God’s image means humankind is made for community akin to that of the Godhead—fundamentally related and ontologically equal while distinct in person and function. Ogbonnaya grounds human intersubjectivity in the belief that prior to creation, the Godhead was dialectical yet undivided. He portrays classic Trinitarian theology as a coming-to-be in time of persons in dynamic relation but now in history fulfilling a mutual essence that is once

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ineffable and visible.16 Alexander Lucie-Smith, a long-time member of the East African theological fraternity, concludes that morality “begins with the Trinity at its heart. It is a morality that puts personal communion and community life as central . . . a Trinitarian faith will stress the communal nature of human existence as opposed to seeing humans as solitary animals.”17 Shrouded in mystery as it is, this communal movement grounded in the Trinity illuminates for these scholars something of the reason why human culture seeks connectedness. Laurent Magesa, one of central Africa’s prominent theologians, affirms that “in the African worldview, belonging is a central principle of being human.”18 Apart from relationships, a person has no identity. This sense of the unity of the cosmos predated the arrival of Christianity in Africa, claims Ambrose Moyo, as “African eyes see the world made up of supernatural, invisible realities. People must live in solidarity with the rest of creation.”19 Not all African scholars support this theological mood. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu insists that African communitarianism requires no theological grounding at all. The intellectual orientation of the Akan people of Ghana, he contends, is fundamentally empirical. For Africans, the divine does not exist outside the known universe. To link ethical universals to a supernatural other is to think gibberish and to speak nonsense. For the Akan, morality is what promotes social well-being by harmonizing interests. Had the ancient Akan written a classic ethic, mutual aid would have been the keynote, not rationalist appeals to duty or injunction revealed by special circumstance.20 Wiredu insists that centuries of human interdependence and mutual aid have established a worldview inherently part of the practical necessity of daily survival. One sees this played out at every level. Poorer Africans own one shirt; seconds go to relatives otherwise shirtless. Rich Africans accumulate and keep wealth only by careful sharing with wide circles of relational claimants; the contentedness of even distant relations assures the safety of centralized family assets. From Southern Africa comes another indigenous strain of African reflection on culture and ethics, closely akin to Wiredu’s communalism. Called Ubuntu, it was recently introduced to the West’s press theory colloquium by Clifford Christians.21 Ubuntu, a Zulu/Xhosa word, is commonly translated “humanity toward others.” It is a normative concept that triggers related concepts such as generosity, patience, kindness, and mutual respect. A person who understands Ubuntu must be a person who recognizes his or her place in the social order, even creational order, and that place has significance. One’s humanity is developed in this notion of mutuality from childhood on. One’s accomplishments, obligations, possessions, intellect, and commitments are all shared and open to public review. To be a person in this kind of cultural milieu, one must talk or perform. Nonparticipation is a contradiction. Seeking advantage at the expense of another is irrational.

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Arguments obviously occur, to be resolved by the wisdom of the collective. Dilemmas arise: in a draught, who gets water, children or cattle? All living things bear a relationship to all others. Ubuntu’s kinship to communitarianism is evident, as both celebrate the priority of relationships over individual autonomy. The nature of the person is social and interdependent; moral norms begin with care; moral blame reaches its nadir in betrayal and treachery. Ubuntu has not been worked out in voluminous literature but lived out in the hardscrabble corners of a continent known for poverty, political corruption, disease, and chaos.22 Ubuntu describes the life of survivors whose experience manifestly teaches the need for human connectedness at every level: economic, spiritual, communicational. Ubuntu is not only the summary of African moral and social wisdom but also its hope. Deeply social yet akin finally to the point and purpose of human work and speech, Ubuntu represents a matrix of ideas and behaviors that undergird claims that a nation’s press owes moral obligation to its people, its neighbors, as sisters, and its brothers. Ubuntu holds promise for women of Africa as well; those who traditionally are child-bearers and laborers, not leaders and hardly citizens, but that is changing rapidly.23 If communitarianism in the West is a reaction to Enlightenment individualism, in sub-Sahara Africa communitarianism is the way the world is constituted, whether cast in terms of theological interrelatedness, as Ogbonnaya argues, or in humanist common faith and survival, as Wiredu prefers. From all sides, the African would appear to regard community as nothing less than the way things are, a precondition of knowledge, even of language. To speak sensibly is to address social reality in communitarian terms. The Kenyan secretary general of the World Council of Churches writes that Africans live in a “social tapestry of relationships which sustain the life of each and all.” The individual is defined “only in relation to others.”24 What if this communitarian impulse is brought face to face with globalization? What if profit-hungry media empires, for instance, meet the African communitarian who has never contemplated his or her neighbor as a market? Can money-driven media practice typical of the West coexist with communitarianism, where relationships are not primarily instrumental and obligations not determined so much by contract as tradition and care? This meeting of two worldviews is already happening. As a result, state-run media systems across sub-Sahara languish. The entertainment they offer is political propaganda, and few listeners or viewers pay serious attention. At the same time, successful commercial channels are foreign owned. These channels offer programming produced in Europe, America, and India. The advertising content for which this programming exists appeals to the top one percent of the economic strata. Who else can afford to buy the adver-

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tised products? We watch and wait for the social fallout, the restructuring. Yet, there are hopeful signs. The communitarian approach I have described supports what we call in the West, accessible media channels. Media should not become the voice of the elite, says Kenyan press critic Philip Ochieng: “There can be no freedom of the press where only a handful of people exist who can efficiently and quickly collect, process, and sell ideas. No country can enjoy freedom of expression in a situation of underdevelopment.”25 Wiredu of Ghana knows that as villages become cities, the technologies of speaking and writing must be available to representative political publics. Media systems aimed at profit or political monoculture cannot enhance dialogue, and without dialogue community withers. Stepping back, we ask if this is the core issue on the continent in chaos? What about child soldiers losing their consciences in nearly every war zone; or starvation, unemployment, illiteracy, the fumes that wreck air quality in the cities and the potholes in every road system? What about orphans and refugees? Let us talk about national armies pillaging their own people, or countless young girls kidnapped for pleasure. Against these African realities, to argue for accessible media channels may seem superfluous. Clean water and sewage treatment are arguable priorities, but communitarian theory insists that all of these social realities are issues about which interested publics must be speaking, in order to coordinate and achieve real solutions. Media literacy and many voices in the public circle are not elixirs, but they are components of public well-being. Accessible media is the modern invitation to join the village palaver. That palaver, described by the Congolese Jesuit Benezet Bujo, is about the moral life and the development of character.26 In African communitarianism, no human life is a prop to another’s happiness. Life is sacred. Every democratic statement on human rights supports free expression and the duty of each person to speak truthfully in context. African communitarianism understands these human needs and responsibilities. Much of the chaos in Africa is due to the loss of these precolonial commitments. The continent needs a recovery of confidence in the rightness of peaceful, animated, cooperative political progress; of dialogue with oppositional voices; and of human sympathy across ethnic and tribal lines. The present conflicts in Africa and Africa’s seven million refugees all scoff at the notion of communitarian revival, but what are the alternatives? Community based media reinforcing communal values have been effective examples of popular participation and ownership. In Kenya, when the Rainbow Coalition defeated KANU in national elections, the electoral victory was secured by people, politically active, using media to report precinct results before the expected ballot-box corruption could be engineered. This significant event and its implications should be noted and explored.27

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In the last five years in Africa, the Internet has been the primary media for breaking old silences and retrieving open dialogue. Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride describes the impact of media technology on the human person.28 Are we capable of making strategic adjustments, he asks, or will the maelstrom of technology dash our culture, our humanness, on the rocks of fragmentation, individualism, and greed. The maelstrom— technology and technicized efficiency, in Jacque Ellul’s terms29—is our problem as well. Will future public discourse in the West show integrity and genuine other-centeredness? Will technology—our use of it, our response to it and our incorporation of its power—make sophists, objectivists, or hedonists of us all? The bedrock communitarianism of Africa is that peoples’ contribution to a partnership we need. Those characteristics of African communitarianism so needed by the West include life-affirming dialogue. Even the tenacious, though irrational, beliefs associated with ethnic hatred are amenable to change if dialogue is steady and caring. Africans who write about their own communitarian climate suggest that, in contrast to the West, public talk there is not bound by commercial or class constraints.30 African communitarianism is expansive. For example, the dialogue concerning human rights is a vigorous conversation with calls for greater government guarantees for the press, for the rule of law, for the special needs of children and women, for literacy and the preservation of minority languages, and for basic education for all. Tokundoh Adeyemo describes the core belief of nearly all African religious groups: “God is, hence we are.”31 In African traditions, this core works itself out in elaborate interconnections of spirit and nature, animistic and fetishistic. However, Christian faith recalibrates those relationships around a beneficent creator-redeemer, a rescuer whose self-sacrifice is humanity’s ultimate hope. The public envisioned in the Bible’s story of redemption are culturally diverse collaborators working it out, enlarging, embracing, ennobling, and rehearsing their identities, values, meanings, and telos.

THE CULTURAL COVENANT Is the West ready to receive this gift from Africa? Federico Mayor, former director-general of UNESCO, articulated the malaise of advanced capitalism: We cannot fail to observe the increase in soul-sickness at the very heart of the most prosperous societies and social categories that seem best protected from misfortune. The heart itself seems prey to a curious void. Indifference and passivity grow. There is an ethical desert. Passions and emotions are blunted. People’s eyes are empty and solidarity evaporates. Grey areas expand. Amnesia wins out. The future seems unreadable. We witness the divorce between fore-

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cast and plan. Long-term vision is discredited. Now and then we are truly sick at heart.32

Mayor recounts the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, symbol of the celebrated demise of the controlled state and warns that celebrations were premature: “Today we are witnessing the economic success of a system [corporate capitalism] based on the concept of liberty that has forgotten equality and solidarity alike. This success is coupled with an ethical vacuum and with an absolute lack of purpose.”33 Reaching for his point, Mayor urges, “The moment of truth has arrived—the fate of the human race itself may be at stake, so weighty will be the combination of dangers jeopardizing our future.”34 These words read like a refrain from the prophet Joel. We live in desperate times. Pointing toward solutions, Mayor proposes four contracts, which he hopes will become an agenda for action. These contracts are not legal agreements, but pledges affirmed by communities that direct resources toward beneficent ends. The first contract he calls the social contract, which addresses all aspects of poverty.35 The second contract, the natural contract, addresses matters of science, development, and the environment. He calls the third contract, the one that engages communication and community, the cultural contract. This one covers languages and media, especially digital media and the new social architecture that rides on those media. Our social world is constituted by symbols that carry meaning for us. Symbols change as needs, goals, and social visions change. Language is an important part of this symbolic world, but music, color, gesture, sound, and signage create and sustain meaning too. Mayor’s cultural contract entails the creation of a media infrastructure that generates more talk, conducted without coercion and leading toward greater freedom and creativity. If freedom means the absence of coercive restraint, then social institutions that seek human well-being should eagerly rescind the privileges of power to let talk follow its course. When freedom needs moral restraint, communities must talk to establish the boundary line between creativity and degeneration.36 Media professionals are taking note. A wonderful new study titled Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, surveys journalists around North America and finds disillusionment and cynicism emerging from the immense disparity between mission and reality. One media professional said, “Screw journalism. It’s all a fraud anyway.”37 Another commented, “I see the country drifting in this mindless direction and the only people with the fortitude to stand up to it are going to save us.”38 Canadian editor Kalle Lasn laid out the problem and the challenge: “The next revolution will be in your head. It will be a propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future. We must identify the core ideas that guide us toward a sustainable future.”39

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The world ahead will need reasons to embrace the stranger and to enlarge community. This capacity must be a corporate treasure that engages our emotions, minds, and passion for service. Perhaps we need new signage. This corporate treasure of human community is well described by the Swahili word heri, meaning “good, right, prosperous, whole, full, happy, hopeful, and content.” In the New Testament’s Beatitudes, heri equates to blessed, the sum of all you want to be. Heri and blessed go beyond the triteness of modern idioms and capture a concept that all cultures desire. To find our way to heri, though, we need help from every part of the world and the wisdom its traditions offer. For public media, heri promotes stories that challenge our stereotypes, that give courage under duress, that celebrate honesty and loyalty, moving us toward the good. For example, when a decade ago Canadians identified excessive media violence as the trigger to mounting violence, Canada’s Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commissions negotiated industry-wide agreements to protect youth from excessive exposure to violent programming. This kind of effort leads us all toward creative recovery of human care.40 The Maasai of East Africa have a failsafe method for peacekeeping. It does not involve a greater force used against a lesser force. The inventory of Maasai weaponry, however, is quite primitive: spears, knives, clubs. These tools of forcefulness are also nearly identical in length, weight, sharpness, and hardness throughout the Great Rift Valley. The failsafe Maasai method for peace is just this: when a tribal elder raises a stick, hostilities end. Weapons are sheathed as warriors disengage. The injured are given care; clubs and shafts give way to talk. Of course, you need practice for this method to work. You must want your community to survive, as well as your adversary’s community. You must recognize wisdom that transcends local complaints. You must understand your own connectedness to a larger project that you together with your neighbor will help create. In the developed West, we have much to learn from this continent in chaos. News coverage, advertising appeals, and entertainment programming shape our vision and our values. Those who make it, and we who use it, must do better at tapping the communal potential of media, adjusting their aims, directing their symbol-making power toward the bonds that unite—those qualities of humanness that mark us, that cause us to imagine what “created in God’s image” is meant to mean.

NOTES 1. George B. N. Ayittey, Africa in Chaos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 6. 2. Peter Schwab, Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2.

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3. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 33. Ong’s seminal research presented the thesis that sound rather than sight denotes the presence of life. 4. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 5. Louise Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 70, 155. 6. Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa, 103. 7. Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa, 206. 8. Mahmood Mamdani explains this distinction in Citizen and Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 9. Levi Obonyo Owino, Growing in the Cradle (PhD diss., Temple University, 2005), 86. 10. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644) (New York: Appleton, 1951), 50. 11. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1956), 7. 12. Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 120–26. The Star Chamber is a reference to the seventeenth-century English courtroom, painted with stars on the ceiling, where trials of political dissidents, speakers, and publishers were conducted. 13. Stephen Carter, The Dissent of the Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6. 14. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Harvest, 1996), 302. 15. Robert D. Leigh, ed., A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), passim. 16. A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, On Communitarian Divinity (New York: Paragon, 1994), 69. 17. Alexander Lucie-Smith, Foundations of Moral Theology (Nairobi: Paulines, 2006), 72. 18. Laurent Magesa, Christian Ethics in Africa (Nairobi: Acton, 2002), 6. 19. Ambrose Moyo, “Material Things in African Society: Implications for Christian Ethics,” in Issues in African Christianity, ed. J. N. K. Mugambi and Anne Nasimiyu (Nairobi: Acton, 2003), 3:51. 20. Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 21. 21. Clifford Christians, “Ubuntu and Communitarianism in Media Ethics,” Ecquid Novi 25, no. 2 (2004): 235–56. 22. Christians, “Ubuntu and Communications,” 241. 23. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitvch, African Women (New York: Westview Press, 1997). 24. Samuel Kobia, The Courage to Hope (Nairobi: Acton, 2003), 43. 25. Philip Ochieng, I Accuse the Press (Nairobi: Acts Press, 1992), 190. 26. Bénézet Bujo, The Ethical Dimension of Community (Nairobi: Paulines, 1998), 35. 27. Personal conversations with leaders of the ballot watchdog movement, July 2005.

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28. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon, 1951), v. 29. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1965), passim. 30. Kobia, Courage to Hope, 107. 31. Tokunboh Adeyemo, “Unapproachable God: The High God of African Traditional Religion,” in The Global God, ed. Aida Besancon Spence and William David Spencer (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998), 138. 32. Frederico Mayor, The World Ahead: Our Future in the Making (New York: Zed, 2001), 5. 33. Mayor, The World Ahead, 18. 34. Mayor, The World Ahead, 14. 35. Mayor, The World Ahead, 17. 36. Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 302. 37. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic, 2001), 147. 38. Gardner and Damon, Good Work, 126. 39. Gardner and Damon, Good Work, 127. 40. Sissela Bok, Mayhem (Reading, Mass: Addison–Wesley, 1998), 153.

IV IMAGINING A WORLD

7 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective Helen M. Sterk

Many people seem to think this is a postfeminist era. Amazon.com lists 151 books dealing with the postfeminist era. However, far more people argue that we live in a “feminized era” as reflected in the 8,410 results in a similar Amazon key term search. A widespread feeling seems to exist that the need for feminism is past and that we have reached a cultural moment when women and men not only share equal rights and opportunities but women actually have more rights and opportunities than men. After all, laws prohibit most discrimination on the basis of sex, and the only jobs not open to women seem to be those of priest and pope. However, even a cursory examination of several key areas of life shows that discriminatory treatment based on gender still is alive and well.1 From the moment of birth and throughout life, gender matters. Consider, for example, several key life contexts: birth, media representation, sport, the economy, business, and politics. In the case of birthing, women’s choices are becoming more, rather than less constrained. Technologies for testing fetuses and monitoring babies’ conditions during labor have become more and more commonplace. Insurance coverage rarely extends to anything other than doctor-guided, hospitalbased births. Caesarean deliveries are framed as ways to regulate birth and avoid pain. Added up, these routine birthing practices remove control from women and their caregivers.2 In the media, male and female celebrities now share the public stage. Women, however, tend to disappear after age forty, while men such as Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood routinely are featured not only as leading men but as romantic leads well into their sixties, even seventies. In sport, women have joined men in taking to the field. Title IX mandated that sport 115

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opportunities be made available to all women in schools that receive federal funding on an equal basis with men. However, ever since its institution in 1972, Title IX has been contested. For example, in 2003, the George W. Bush administration created a commission whose mission was to change regulations to favor male sports over female. After long debate, Title IX was reaffirmed. Notwithstanding, the percentage of women intercollegiate athletes involved in competitive sports remains at a low 30 percent, even though women make up closer to 65 percent of college and university populations.3 In the economy, the wage gap between women and men has been narrowing. In the 1980s, American women earned 59 cents on average for every dollar men earned, which has risen to 77 cents currently for white women.4 Women of color lag even further behind, earning 67 cents on average in comparison to all men if they are black, and an even lower 54 cents if they are Latina.5 In business, statistics indicate that the higher the position, the greater the probability that the manager is a man. In 2006, only 16.4 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers were women; of those only 9.4 percent held what the research organization Catalyst calls “clout titles” (vice president or higher).6 At the current rate of growth, Catalyst projects that forty more years will be needed in order for women to achieve parity with men in corporate life. In medicine and law, women appear to have made great strides. However, gender hegemony emerges in the fact that as women begin to outnumber men in certain specialties, both the prestige and the pay plummet in those specialties.7 In politics, women are running for political office, closing in on a run for the presidency. However, in 2006, only sixteen women served in the Senate, seventy-one in the House of Representatives (in each case, roughly 16 percent of the legislative bodies), and only nine governors were women. In fact, the U.S. ranks sixtieth in the world (out of 187 countries) in terms of women’s representation in national government.8 Today, as it was historically, the more things seem to change in gender relations, the more they stay the same. The paradox leads me to ask, “Why do inequities between women and men continue? What dynamics maintain those ‘glass walls and ceilings’ that appeared to be cracking in the late twentieth century?” Why is there still such currency to the idea that a feminized era is something to be feared? Inequities remain in place due to a dominant cultural worldview that frames women and men as opposite. This worldview crosses secular and religious boundaries. In such a worldview, women and men are seen as unable to understand each other at all. At best, they are presented as complementary to one another in a gender hierarchy, where men remain dominant.

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I would like to argue for an alternative, one that recognizes the gendered qualities of life but honors the fluidity of the meaning of gender. Different circumstances call for different responses. Fluid gendered responses bend and bow in a relational dance. Instead of opposition, this flexible concept of gender relations draws upon ideas of partnership. This concept contrasts with an emphatic, predetermined complementarianism that dictates action based on a rigid sense of sex roles. Instead, in partnership, gender relations are set loose from predictable sex roles and allowed to form, reform, and shift, given the dynamics of the persons and the situations involved. To move through this argument, first, I will lay out a way to think about worldviews and their roles in gender relations. Second, I will discuss gender within an oppositional framework and contrast that with a framework of care, which reflects a worldview of partnership. Finally, I will present a scenario of gendered life that will illustrate care at work within a policy context.

WORLDVIEW THINKING We operate out of a set of life assumptions that guide our choices for action and communication. This is what a worldview is, both normative and formative. In my case, I operate out of two worldviews, feminist and Christian. Often, they overlap, sometimes they even coalesce and inform each other. Naming these worldviews as central to my scholarship threatened (but did not derail) my tenure case early in my career. One colleague on the college promotion and tenure committee was of the opinion that all scholarship should be disinterested and come from a neutral standpoint—that bringing in one’s own assumptions and background inevitably would pollute the scholarship. That opinion is not unusual. However, I have come to believe that this kind of neutrality is impossible. One of the human gifts of postmodernism is the opening of a public space for scholarship that comes out of faith and life traditions, a scholarship that allows public recognition of a person’s identity. Jewish scholars, Muslim scholars, Christian scholars; feminist, socialist, race-based theorists—all claim an intellectual space. This opening refreshes and invigorates scholarship while unmasking the myth of neutrality. Even taking into consideration the fragmentation of public thought that the demise of modernism has engendered, on balance, much is redemptive in postmodernism’s broadening of the academic stage. However, a dark side exists to this more open public intellectual space, a darkness that can wither worldview-grounded scholarship. Some who take advantage of the spaces opened up by postmodernity absolutize their own positions at the expense of others’. Michelle Goldberg, in Kingdom Coming,

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on a phenomenon she calls the rise of Christian nationalism, shows how some conservative, fundamentalist Christians are trying to silence nonChristian voices in American life. As she portrays it, rather than entering public space and engaging with others in an authentic exchange of ideas, some Christians’ goal is to take over the public space with their worldview dominating and marginalizing others.9 John Danforth, former senator from Missouri and UN ambassador, makes a similar argument in Faith and Politics. Self-identifying as Christian, he says there are many ways to be Christian; thus, no one way should be ceded the public space that is now opened to faith perspectives. While Christianity affects political thought and work, he argues that Christians of strong faith may well come down on opposite sides of an issue.10 Both authors show how triumphalism has served Christianity poorly in public life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. When a Christian worldview is played as a trump card to stop conversation, it ceases to serve the common good. In the current political and religious context, where fundamentalist Christian voices dominate, more moderate Christian voices must enter the conversation, and people of all faiths need to lay claim to the public square. Daniel Maguire offers one model. In A Moral Creed for All Christians11 and The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity,12 Maguire argues that Christianity should take its place within the range of human faiths, entering into dialogue rather than seeking domination, to the end goal of all living together in harmony. I endorse this model of public civil engagement—speaking out of a clear point of view, allowing other points of view to be elaborated, and then seeking common ground for action in life. As Diane Eck, director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University explains, pluralism “does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments.”13 In this form of engagement, people are aware of, and transparent about, what they think and believe; they define its foundations, its limits. Pluralist thinkers remain open to respectful conversation with other points of view, not necessarily becoming converted to those views but creatively engaging in dialogue in order to create cooperative ways of living together in the world. One strategy of civic and civil engagement is “invitational rhetoric” identified by Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin. Invitational rhetoric entails respect, honesty, and honor for others.14 In contrast with coercive rhetoric, which tends to put the speaker in control of topics, issues, and strategies, invitational rhetoric focuses on enhancing conversations between speakers and audiences through encouraging reciprocal storytelling and sharing of strategies. Worldview thinking, at its best, starts thoughtful conversations that allow people to know who they are, what they stand for and why—but does not impose an ending point to which all people should be forced. Through

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the rhetoric of invitation, people can move together toward common ground, toward places where their worldviews’ values and goals overlap. Returning to gender, the question remains: why do inequities between women and men remain so deeply embedded in our cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and religious lives? Why does a worldview of gender opposition rather than gender partnership continue to exercise hegemony?

PARADOXES AND TABOOS Arguments affecting gender relations tend to operate on the assumption that either nature or nurture influences humans to act in masculine or feminine ways. The nature argument continues to be attractive, presenting women and men as polar opposites, and concluding that it is futile, if not actually wrong, to work against the grain of nature. Differences among men and women are believed to be innate; women do not participate in sport, politics, work, and public life as much as men because their nature does not encourage them to do so. What women really want, deep down, at some biological level, the argument goes, is to have children and stay home with them. Thus, when women choose to act against their nature, everyone in the family suffers.15 An extension of the same argument, offered by groups such as Promise Keepers and Concerned Women for America, presumes that gender differences are due to created differences between the sexes. God made men to lead and women to be led. Whether the rhetoric calls on nature, or on creation, both are grounded upon the assumption that gender differences are essential. Furthermore, these differences must be accepted for the world to operate as it should, in a complementary balance of femininity and masculinity. To do otherwise, such rhetoric holds, leads to chaos. Given the hold of arguments based on biology or creation, it seems taboo, in some deeply felt way, to argue that cultural institutions may be the source of gender construction. It seems impolite to argue that differences remain firmly in place because of the hegemony of patriarchy, a cultural system within which all that is associated with women is devalued. Yet, as the examples at the beginning of this chapter suggest, femininity remains in a one-down relation to masculinity in virtually every life context (femininity and masculinity because individual women and men are able to escape the boxes only occasionally—in this case, the exceptions remain just that, exceptions). Gender relations are weighted with power, the power that comes from cultural evaluation. Biology alone does not determine human behavior. In the case of gender relations, this means that one’s given sex has far less to do with how one acts than does one’s gender assignment, gender identity, and social

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and cultural possibilities in relation to gender. Biology certainly influences our actions; we all need air, water, food, love, and a sense of family in our lives. As a person of faith, I also believe that God made us—all of us—as embodied individuals who are embedded in social and cultural situations. In a very real way, human action is mediated by culture, affected by human will. We are more than the sum of our biological parts. Routinely, humans overcome biological obstacles to achieve far more than anyone would predict. For example, Helen Keller’s brilliance did not remain hidden behind being deaf and blind. Likewise, Stephen Hawking’s significant physical disabilities have not stopped his intellectual contributions. Nor did the gender of Queen Elizabeth I thwart her from governing England. Policies and systems of meaning that depend upon unexamined worldviews and a naive acceptance of “natural” gender relations may undermine, but cannot kill, human initiative and accomplishment. An ideology of gender based on biology or creation does not encourage full human flourishing because such an ideology subordinates being human to being male/masculine or female/feminine. However, when a priori social and cultural rules of gender duality and hierarchy are lifted, both women and men achieve interesting, often unpredicted outcomes. Given a gender worldview of partnership, private and public life can change, often for the better. People can share jobs. Women can give birth and men can care for the babies. Policies on leave and vacation time can shift to reflect concern for family life, and measures of success in any sphere of life moderate. What might be the means by which not only individuals but society and culture break the grip of rules and roles based on an idea of what nature/ creation equips women and men to do?

FEMINIST POWER ANALYSIS As a response to arguments based on nature/creation, typically feminists have turned to power analyses to try to open up space for women, relying on the assumption that nurture affects gender identity and relations more than nature. In the field of communication, feminism’s first contribution came in the form of critique of masculine hegemony—the unquestioned power of defining both people and concepts from the vantage point of masculinity. In particular, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell charted women’s perilous journeys through the rhetorical paths cut by men who had access to resources and political power. She argued that women required different ways of speaking, not because they were biologically different from men but because their social and cultural positions differed so markedly from men’s.16 Along with her, many others have documented the ways masculinity structures women’s possibilities in politics, media, and personal life.

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Feminist rhetorical scholars have recently realized that power analyses alone cannot motivate positive communication, either publicly or privately. Three reasons support this realization. First, such analyses lead to reification of the status quo rather than change. When the status quo is reified, the implication is that people cannot escape existing power structures, leading to the attitude, why try? Because these power structures seem to obliterate human agency, motivation for action is not ignited through learning what these structures are and how they operate. Second, these analyses offer an impoverished view of humanity. Power critiques obscure human variation. If masculine power is the focus of attention, women’s agency looks minimal and men’s power seems unlimited. That is not true to life as we know it; individual women and men show much more varied life patterns than power analyses allow us to see. Third, power analyses limit what can be considered worthy of study because power critiques limit analyses to what men do and say about women. These critiques allow too little exploration of how humans take up rhetoric, how they internalize it, and what they do with it. Instead of encouraging discovery and advocacy of nonhegemonic norms, and styles and structures of communication, power critiques limit us to, hmmm, power critiques. One of the great ironies of feminist theory based upon analyses of power, which leave masculine hegemony and feminine powerlessness in place, is that such theory places women and men in opposition, just as does the nature/creation theory of gender. Both ask us to see the world as constituted by two polarized genders in which men oppress women, and where the only relational option that serves women well is complete separation from men. We need theorizing that does not imply one gender is more human than another and encourages partnership. While power analyses remain necessary in understanding gender relations and human agency’s possibilities and limits, power analyses work best as starting, but not ending, points.

CARE THEORY17 Care theory, as opposed to power analyses, begins with the premise that all humans are connected by (sometimes invisible) bands of love, whether they are related by blood to one another or not. It stands in contrast to a Darwinian understanding of the world as premised on power, in which the fittest survive at the cost of the demise of the weakest. Developed largely by feminist philosophers and theorists, care theory develops ways to help people understand how their actions and relationships affect other people and the world, toward the end of increasing empathy, informed decisionmaking, and care for the least of these. In that way, care theory resonates

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strongly with Christian thought and practice based on the model of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. Rather than begin with the theory, let us look at a poem that contrasts a rhetoric of power with a rhetoric of care. This poem comes in the form of a short narrative based on real-life experiences in a young boy’s life in northwestern Iowa. Situated as it is in real communication practice, it shows how a desire for control withers when care enters the situation. Written by Sietze Buning (the pen name of Stanley Wiersma), “First Lesson in Rhetoric” tells the story of a twelve-year-old Iowa farm boy in an upstairs bedroom listening in to a conversation between his father, a church elder, and a fellow elder: Father’s Fellow elder Marius called in— Frequently. Did his talk Leave too little or too much To the imagination of the emerging Adolescent trying to sleep in the room Above with an opening register in between? “Confession of guilt at consistory meeting is not enough. Better to have them stand up at a service. Better to purge The unclean thing from among us. There are more and more Shotgun weddings. Nothing to be afraid of, standing up In church, not after sinners stand before God and confess. Besides, it’s a chance for the church to welcome back the Wayward. A truly Christian couple would prefer it.” Several such visits—the cases different But the rhetoric identical—and rhetoric Not even part of our active vocabularies— And then a visit from Marius with a new Rhetoric: “Our Martha Loved unwisely. Our Martha must keep The baby. Our Martha So repentant, so sensitive. Must our Martha stand in church? Her mother will die—blood Pressure over two-hundred Right along. Our Martha . . .”

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Did the differences in rhetoric leave Too little or too much to the imagination Of the emerging adolescent, ear at The register? And none Of us—not Marius, Not Father, not I, even aware Of the word Rhetoric.18

As long as the form of language, such as public confession, served Marius’s need to control those he defined as sinners, he emphasized the power function of communication. However, when he found himself enmeshed in fatherly love with just such a “sinner,” he sought other, more caring, language forms. He loved his wayward Martha. He loved his heartsick wife. In the face of this love and care, his desire to exercise the power of public humiliation over them shriveled. When care colors communication, the meaning and means both change. Care theorists argue that humans innately care about and love other humans—not only blood relatives—and that care is as strong a motivator for human action as is the drive to power. Philosopher Nel Noddings looks to her own experience and consciousness of giving and receiving care for evidence of the radical reality of connection.19 Sara Ruddick sees the attitude of care triggered through caregiving, tracing example after example of both men and women connecting with others when called to take physical care of them.20 Joan Tronto finds dependency as a “natural part of the human experience,” both male and female, one to be accepted rather than seen as “character destroying.”21 Communication theorist Julia Wood sees humans giving and receiving care simply by virtue of their humanity.22 Rhetorical theorists Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin have argued that care and connection come from humans’ essential and shared spirituality.23 With a more focused reference to the need to recognize how faith shapes care, geographer Janel Curry draws on social Trinitarian theology when she states, “In Christian terms, all being is being-with; all existence is co-existence, because the God who makes and sustains all things is a triune community of mutually engendering and indwelling love.”24 For each, care is a natural response to the human condition. None of us wants to be alone in the world, least of all during times of extreme physical or emotional crisis, such as giving birth, facing illness or death, or dying. At its most basic level, care means reassurance that we are connected with other humans, that we matter to other people. When we are treated as if we are separate from other humans rather than tied by mutual rights and responsibilities, we are being controlled, not being given care.

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In the context of care, self-love and love for others are bound together. Western culture, points out Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self, recognizes three senses of self: separative (which refers to the individual who demands personal rights and is concerned with autonomy); soluable (which refers to one who loses a sense of self in order to serve others); and connective (which refers to one who balances a love for self with a love for others). Culturally, the separative self has been remanded to masculinity and the soluable to femininity. The connective self is currently under cultural negotiation. Because a connective sense of self is not associated with one gender, it is suited to partnership.25 The connective sense of self holds rights and responsibilities as flexible, as in creative tension, much as does Jesus’s admonition to “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” This line of thinking resonates with Augustine’s admonition to love others: in philosopher Ruth Groenhout’s framing of Augustine, she finds that “when human relationships are in good order, they involve each human loving the other as the self, each concerned about the good of each other.”26 In addition, the connective self hearkens to Carol Gilligan’s generative formulation of women’s morality as balancing the needs of others against one’s own needs in In a Different Voice.27 Since Gilligan, many feminist theorists have come to the recognition that this sense of morality is not so much essentially female as it is deeply human. Herein lies the genius of the connective sense of self: it encourages people to see themselves as having value equal to their neighbor and at the same time requires people to see others as making legitimate demands upon them. One of the challenges in working with care theory is to see how it can move from the interpersonal realm into public life. It seems easy, almost self-evident, to say that care should govern interpersonal relations. That point of view makes a cul-de-sac of care theory, limiting its application to family and friends. In those contexts, too, women are seen as the primary and appropriate caregivers. It is much harder to apply care theory to a public situation, to policymaking. In policymaking, power relations and discourses tend to predominate. What might a real policymaking communication ethic of care look like? How would it differ from a communication ethic based on power? At this point, a philosopher might lay out principles of care and construct a hypothetical case, a historian might tell the story of a well-documented past situation that has been resolved, a political scientist might look to an example of government policymaking. As a communication scholar, I will look at a real, evolving case of policymaking, where real-life constraints and real people make caring communication a lively, volatile interaction. As a person of faith, my concern is with loving my neighbor as I love myself. As a feminist, I will draw on feminist principles for human interaction.

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I begin with a reframing of Gerda Lerner’s five characteristics of feminist consciousness into terms of care, shaping these five into a set of principles that constitute an ethic of care that bridges interpersonal and public life. Lerner’s five characteristics are, first, to be aware of living in a symbolically maintained system of power relations; second, to realize that everyone, including oneself, has some level of power within the system; third, to see others as engaged with oneself; fourth, to tell the stories of their own situations; and fifth, to develop a vision of mutual care and responsibility.28 Taken together, these five do indeed constitute an ethic of care, a set of guiding principles that integrate self-love with interdependence. When we examine and analyze a real policy in a real place in the light of care theory—of caring for, not controlling people—we can see the practical possibilities of care theorizing. This example, one that I know well from both experience and observation, draws on a current situation common to many academic institutions and of vital interest to all faculty members, particularly those of childbearing age—a private college’s maternity leave policy. While the example depends for meaning on a national context of privatized healthcare and a local context of a church-related, four-year, private, liberal arts college, it tells a universal story: when decision-making is done without adequate consideration of the persons involved, the decisions can harm as much as help. This story can be generalized to policymaking on almost any level, from family to national to international. Like many schools, one church-related, private, four-year college in the Midwest of the United States faces the challenge of an aging faculty. Roughly 50 percent of the faculty members will be retiring in the next ten years. Roughly half of those people are married, male, full professors with wives who have taken full responsibility for housework, care of children, social networking, health, church life, doctors’ appointments, and the like. For these professors, having babies meant some caregiving, but mostly it meant working hard to make the money to support a family. That profile is shifting dramatically. Many of the college’s new faculty members are women; some are couples sharing a position; several are couples where the woman is the primary wage earner. The college’s maternity policy was written to be generous in the abstract sense of things. Instead of giving people twelve weeks unpaid leave, as is mandated in the United States’ Family and Medical Leave Act, the college policy offers six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid leave. However, as is true of many such seemingly clean and simple policies that are made without adequate consideration of persons and circumstances, this policy harms more than it helps. While such a policy might work for staff persons, whose work has a day-to-day rhythm, it is clumsy, if not useless when applied to a person who teaches, whose work has a

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semester-to-semester rhythm. Taking a six to twelve week leave in the middle of a semester is next to impossible; continuity of teaching cannot be sustained. Some faculty members discovered that they could make personal deals with their chairs and deans. Those who knew the behindthe-scenes possibilities for other ways to structure a leave found ways to circumvent the policy on an ad hoc basis. As a result of a one-size-fits-all policy that did not take into account the realities of college teaching as well as new parenthood, every person who wished to claim more than the minimal, on-the-books benefit had to negotiate their own unique package. As a further consequence of the ad hoc nature of individual dealings, chairs and deans did not always know what had been done before. Therefore, precedents were unavailable to guide the decisions. The entire process came to be stressful and humiliating, no matter whether faculty members took the written policy leave or negotiated something more advantageous, leaving people vulnerable and resentful at a time when they most needed care. A group of faculty and administrators noticed the inequities of the policy and banded together to create a leave policy that reflects care for all persons and consideration of the good of the college, helping the college to live up to its faith values and claims of being a family-friendly institution. This group is well aware of the first principle of care ethics: they are located within a symbolically maintained system of power relations. They realize the college is located within a context of privatized health insurance and American parental leave policies. Members include a current dean, a past dean, a longtime advocate of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and a department chair. Consulting members include women who currently are pregnant and men who either are or could become fathers. All members of the group value power analyses, understanding that without them, new policy proposals will not work. This group is crafting a policy that will go to the personnel and practices committee that is authorized to move such policies along, as well as to the vice-president for academic affairs, for information. Second, the people who are becoming fathers and mothers are starting to see themselves as having some power in this system, even though they did not feel so at first. Just recognizing their sheer numbers, now and in the near future, helps. Third, the potential parents and the ad hoc group know with whom they need to be engaged—other faculty, appropriate committees, the faculty deliberative body, and academic administrators. No one alone has enough information or wisdom to create a good policy. Fourth, people who are having babies are telling their stories to people who can help form policies. These stories help to show the fault lines of the current and proposed policies, leading to more flexible and comprehensive policymaking. Finally, everyone involved sees themselves as needing to help take care of each other. Older faculty need younger ones to replace them; babies need people to take

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care of them; younger faculty need not only support but also to explain the complexities of their lives. The whole community needs to live out family values based on the needs of real, not hypothetical, families. The proposal is this: if a faculty member has a baby coming into the family during a semester either through birth or adoption, they are entitled to take a semester’s leave from teaching. That leave will cost them 15 percent of their yearly salary if they want to cease all other nonteaching duties that entire semester. If they make an arrangement either with their chair or their dean to do research, advising, and some administrative work for the semester, they may receive 100 percent of their yearly salary. If a person has a child arrive in the summer, the faculty member may take a one-course reduction either the semester before or after the baby arrives. The policy reflects care for all involved—the long-term good of human beings and the college as well as the short-term needs of new parents. This analysis shows how an ethic of care might work to help frame and shape policy decision-making. While the particular situation of the college in question may be highlighted in this example, the potential applications of the five characteristics of an ethic of care reach far beyond the school. In principle, caring requires recognition of human relatedness, of mutual responsibility for action, and of personal knowledge as a legitimate source of information for policymaking. When human interdependence is honored, care takes place. This chapter began with the argument that gender relations are becoming increasingly polarized, rather than integrated. Estrangement, coercion, polarization, and opposition mark human gender relations. However, that does not need to remain the case. Neither nature nor nurture theories of gender lead to positive, equitable relations. Instead, each furthers division and a false sense of the bifurcation of humanity. A theory based on human care brings women and men together as partners in the world. When people operate within an ethic of care, they will be different. They will not be able easily to essentialize and compartmentalize other people. Gender relations cannot help but be transformed from the easy and clichéd oppositions of John Gray’s “men are from Mars and women from Venus,”29 or the rappers’ ganstas and hos, or Braveheart’s30 throwback mythic roles of warriors and maidens to women and men sharing the work of the world. Care theory leads to partnership rather than opposition as the ruling deep metaphor of human relations. People will not stand upon their own rights as absolute or their individualism as sacred. Instead, they will find themselves flexing, considering people, situations, and what courses of action will best serve all involved. They will give profound honor both to themselves and others, thereby loving their neighbors as they love themselves. The vision of partnership resonates deeply with the Christian theological tradition. The tradition encourages a sense of human life as in a trajectory

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begun with the biblical narrative. In the tradition, the world is a good place, created by God, given to humans to care for and nurture—to humans as male and female, not just to males with females as supporters of male endeavor—made so deeply wrong by human sin, redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus, supported by the work of the Holy Spirit in human lives, and intended for future good. This trajectory means gender partnership is needed to tie us together in common nurture and care, with each person contributing fully in line with their gifts and inclinations. Care for people and the world provides an important common cause that religious and nonreligious scholars can share. The concept of care opens a common space that can be shared by people of good will. We may have different basic assumptions on why we share the space of care—for Christians, the answer comes from faith. Christians care because God cared first. God calls us to love one another. Christians know why every single human being matters. We matter because we are made in God’s image and are called to care for the world. In the eyes of God, no one is marginal. Because of that, we are free to love ourselves, and we are bound to love each other. People who do not identify themselves as Christian may base their reasons for caring on another faith tradition, or a basic belief in the goodness of humanity, or from their family’s values. In care theory, people can come together, with common humanity trumping any divisions of race or class or gender. We would do well to nurture all the foundations of care as we listen, learn, and decide how to live our own lives in community with others.

NOTES 1. While sex and gender are closely related concepts, sex generally refers to being physically male or female, while gender generally refers to the social and cultural meanings given to whatever is associated with maleness and femaleness, namely masculinity and femininity. In this chapter, I use the term gender most often because my focus is less on physical distinctions than on social and cultural ones. 2. Helen Sterk et al., Who’s Having This Baby: Perspectives on Birthing (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002). 3. “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” Women in Sport (September 9, 2006), at webpages.charter.net/womeninsport/ (accessed August 15, 2007). 4. “Women’s Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s, 1951–2004,” Infoplease (September 9, 2006), at www.infoplease.com/ipa/AO193820.html (accessed August 15, 2007). 5. Ellen Bravo, “Wage Gap Persists between Men, Women,” Miami Herald, November 14, 2003, at www.commondreams.org/viewsoc/1114-03.htm (accessed March 23, 2004). 6. “Rate of Women’s Advancement to Top Corporate Offices Slow, New Catalyst 10th Anniversary Census Shows,” Catalyst, at www.catalyst.org/pressroom/press

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_releases/7_26_06%20%202005%20COTE%20release.pdf (accessed September 9, 2006). 7. Iona Heath, “Women in Medicine,” BMJ 329 (August 21, 2004), at www.bmj .com/cgi/content/extract/329/7463/412. 8. “Snapshots of Current Political Leadership,” The White House Project (2006), at www.thewhitehouseproject.org/about/casestatement/documents/FinalCase3-23 .pdf (accessed April 19, 2007). 9. Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 10. John Danforth, Faith and Politics: How the “Moral Values” Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward (New York: Viking, 2006). 11. Daniel C. Maguire, A Moral Creed for All Christians (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005). 12. Daniel C. Maguire, The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity: Reclaiming the Revolution (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993). 13. Mary E. Hunt, quoting Diane Eck in “Unfinished Business: The Flowering of Feminist/Womanist Theologies,” in Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect, ed. Rosemary Radford Reuther (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 88. 14. Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory: Toward a Clarification of Boundaries,” Western Journal of Communication 56 (Fall 1992): 330–49. 15. Caitlin Flanagan, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 2004), at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/flanagan.htm (accessed May 5, 2004). 16. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). 17. A short digression: At times in my life, power analyses consumed my life as a scholar—their influence leaked over into my personal and professional life, souring me on men. I spent a year working on a coauthored book on Christianity and gender, living and writing with four other strong feminists. At the time, power analyses seemed the only way to talk about gender. My marriage suffered and even my relationship with my infant son suffered because of my deep distrust of men and masculinity. As a result and in order to reestablish balance, I focused as a scholar solely on something I thought belonged only to women—birth. However, again it led to implicating men and masculinity, and not just in getting pregnant! Finally, in the mid-1990s, I discovered care theory in feminist thought, and it reintegrated my faith and life with feminism because it offered a way to think positively, yet still retain an edge of critique about women and men in life relations. 18. Sietze Buning, “First Lesson in Rhetoric,” in Purpaleanie and Other Permutations (Orange City, Iowa: Middleburg Press, 1978). 19. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 20. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). 21. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 163.

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22. Julia Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). 23. Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory,” 330–49. 24. Janel Curry, “Globalization and the Problem of the Nature/Culture Boundary,” in Secularity and Globalization: What Comes After Modernity? ed. James K. A. Smith (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, forthcoming), 19. 25. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). 26. Ruth Groenhout, Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 66. 27. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 28. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 29. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 30. Braveheart, Paramount Pictures (1995).

8 American Poverty Policy: Concerns about the Nature of Persons in a Good Society1 Kurt C. Schaefer

By 1990, the century’s big economic question had changed. Is capitalism preferable to planned socialism? had been replaced by, What sort of capitalism do we want to have? By 1990, the United States was wealthy. The country was flexible and efficient and technologically advanced, but was it fair? Were the vulnerable being treated justly? By mid-decade America was setting out on an experiment to explore these questions. The 1990s was the decade of welfare reform, with dramatic changes in support for poor families. This chapter is an account of those experiments and their effects. Recent American experience with poverty policy supplies a rich narrative concerning which approaches seem to work, and which others are attractive but counterproductive. We have learned a great deal—much of it surprising and counterintuitive—about how policies affect the vulnerable. This analysis should engage us for a number of reasons. First, we can learn practical things about how best to care for each other, which is often far from obvious. The careful study of actual events can save us from advocating approaches that seem reasonable but do not work. Second, this is an area in which basic values and views of human nature loom large, both in framing policies and in evaluating them. Although sometimes technical, the discussion is meant to probe normative questions about the nature of persons and a good society. Both of these motives, the practical and values, are related to the Scriptures and their rich picture of life as whole persons in a rightly ordered world. The Scriptures take a high view of the dignity of the person.2 Each person is given responsibility to pursue virtue and sacrificial love, to make responsible choices, and to anticipate bad personal consequences after bad 131

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choices. All of creation is normed by God, and human persons are the primary stewards of that creation, responsible to disclose creation according to the norms it was meant to follow. Yet, the Scriptures teach that persons are not merely individuals.3 God is a Trinity of persons living in perfect community and love. The eternal life of the Godhead, to which humans are called, is a communal life of love, deference, communication, and joy in creating the space in which others can prosper and find their full meaning. A share of this eternal, communal life is what God mediates out to humans in the creative work of God’s Son. To be created in God’s image is to be irreducibly a part of a larger community of human persons. A single person is not meant to fully bear God’s image: “Let us make them in our image . . . It is not good for the man to be alone.” To be fully human is to be part of a community, with obligations running in both directions—from individual to group and from group to individual. Thus, the Scriptures’ vision of true humanity is one of virtuous persons living in right community. The Fall—the rebellion against the God-given norms that establish meaning and joy—has affected humans in the fullest sense, both individual persons and the communities and institutions by which we seek to disclose God’s creation. By God’s grace, however, the Trinity is at work redeeming and restoring this entire full humanity—individual persons, the communities and institutions that they inhabit, and the creation that they together are disclosing. The Hebrew prophets drive this emphasis home. Their vision for God’s intentions in the world includes worship and piety but also encompasses the practical ways that communities work, especially their care for the poor. Lest anyone think that this message is limited to communities of the faithful, or meant to be spiritualized, the prophets teach that God holds all nations accountable for the ways in which they disclose the creation, especially for the treatment of the most marginalized.

THE PROGRAMS WE LOVE TO HATE Many discussions of welfare get off on the wrong foot because of basic misunderstandings about the programs and our historical experiences with them. Thus, I start with a review of the main American antipoverty programs. In brief, two main income-transfer programs have been aimed at the poor (Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] and Supplemental Security Income [SSI]), and their summed budgets are relatively small— about $50 billion per year, for an average benefit in each of about $400 per month. Another $50 billion each year goes to housing and food subsidies, and $200 billion subsidizes medical insurance through Medicaid. These

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budgets are dwarfed by the income redistribution that takes place through Social Security and Medicare.4 Social Security was established in 1935 as a social insurance program, providing old-age, survivor, and disability benefits. Since 1965, the program has provided medical insurance to the elderly and disabled through Medicare. About 90 percent of Americans participate in one of these programs. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, with maximum and minimum benefits that contain a significant implicit redistribution of income. Most retirees are covered by Medicare regardless of income, subsidizing their medical expenses while offering an optional supplementary medical expense program. The expense of the program is growing rapidly. Other programs include a range of approaches and target populations. Medicaid offers medical-care coverage similar to Medicare, but is directed to low-income persons. The number of participants is roughly equal to the number not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, yet not receiving health insurance through their employment—America’s uninsured. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program was created in 1974 to support the incomes of very low-income elderly and disabled persons who otherwise would have little Social Security coverage. Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the main traditional income-assistance program, officially ended in 1996. AFDC was funded by the states, with matching funding from the federal government. Monthly benefit levels varied widely across the states (with highs over $1,000 per month and lows under $300). Eligibility required very low income, essentially no assets, and (almost always) single parenthood. Unemployment compensation programs support those seeking work who are unemployed involuntarily. Programs vary by state, averaging about twenty months of support at about one-third of one’s normal wages. Recipients are paid regardless of their income or assets. In addition, many separate programs offer housing support, including public housing (in which rent is generally limited to less than 30 percent of income) and “Section 8” subsidies to cover landlord rents for low-income inhabitants. The Food Stamp (FS) Program adds additional support and provides stamps or debit cards for food purchases at a discount. The amount of discount depends on income and family size. The tax system provides benefits as well. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable federal tax credit that subsidizes low-wage incomes in working families. The EITC tries to support the poor while rewarding work. In this program, one’s tax liability falls by about $0.35–$0.40 for each dollar of income earned up to a basic level of income (influenced by the size of the family). After this limit, the per-dollar-earned benefit declines until, at high enough levels of earned income, one ceases to qualify for the program. Some states supplement the federal EITC with additional, more generous funding.

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POVERTY PROGRAMS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT These welfare spending programs, described above, have not been static. They have been repeatedly reformed during the last forty years, each reform about a decade long. What follows is an overview of these eras. President Johnson’s administration launched its Great Society program in the mid-1960s, emphasizing economic and social rights. Closely following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many welfare and health programs were created or significantly expanded in 1965. These programs included an expansion of AFDC, public housing, urban renewal, public education, public health insurance (with creation of Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income programs) and food assistance (by creating the Food Stamp Program). In principle, recipients of AFDC were required to register for work or job training, but in practice, welfare payments were guaranteed for female-headed households. President Nixon embraced and expanded these programs, adding worker health and safety regulation, consumer product safety, environmental regulation, and regulation of the rights of those accused of crimes. Taken together, these changes constituted a revolution in the role of government, in the interest of promoting rights and freedom of opportunity. Christians and other observers are of course divided on the usefulness of this approach in caring for marginalized citizens, and the discipline of economics may have something to contribute in helping to resolve that difference of opinion, because the next thirty years were a testing ground from which we can gather some preliminary conclusions about the practical effects of this approach. The next era of welfare policy, between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, brought about some individual program funding expansion, but was typified by its overall steady decline in after-inflation AFDC benefits. The major AFDC reform legislation of the period—the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act—removed many working families from eligibility for AFDC. These restrictions in eligibility were roughly offset by steady growth in the number of single-parent low-income families, leaving total after-inflation AFDC spending about constant. Several stereotypes do not hold during this period. Little evidence exists that the expansion of programs caused a general loss of stigma associated with public assistance, at least after the mid-1960s. Said differently, data do not show that the work ethic of low-income Americans declined due to the expansion of AFDC and similar programs. At any time, roughly 40 percent of those eligible for assistance did not participate, and recent immigrants generally had lower participation rates than long-term residents. Stereotypes about family structure and welfare are rather complicated to evaluate. Average AFDC family size shrank, from 4.0 in 1969 to 2.9

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in 1993, but the structure of those families changed significantly. In the Johnson-Nixon era, the most common reason for participation in AFDC remained divorce or separation (about 45 percent), and the primary reason for leaving AFDC was marriage (about 35 percent). Only about 30 percent enrolled because an unmarried woman gave birth. However, women entering due to divorce tended to have shorter spells of participation, so that the welfare rolls did come to be dominated by families who had never experienced a marriage. Hence, the unexpected phenomenon that most of the families helped by AFDC received short-term postdivorce assistance, but most of the families receiving AFDC at any one time were headed by never-married single mothers. Poverty rates among those fatherless households have not changed much, but the number of such families has increased dramatically in the last thirty years. The majority of women receiving AFDC in the 1950s were widows. By the 1970s, the majority were divorced. In the 1980s the majority became never-married single mothers. Another group of stereotypes about individual recipients must also be resisted, and, because economists are in the habit of studying these individual attributes, the profession may be of some help in keeping the debate honest at this point: the educational attainment of welfare participants increased over time. In the 1960s most had high school or less, but by 1991, 12 percent had completed some college. Although welfare recipients are disproportionately black, they were at least as likely to be white as black, and the percentage of recipients who are black steadily declined from the 1960s to the 1990s (from 45 percent to 36 percent). The growth in nevermarried welfare mothers was not primarily due to an increase in enrollment by teenage mothers; women 20 or older accounted for most of the increase. Never-married women on welfare over 25 grew from 48 percent of the total (1976) to 62 percent (1992). Even after correcting these overly negative stereotypes, by the late 1980s abundant reason for concern existed about the effect of welfare policy on the poor, and as a result, political support for traditional income support programs had significantly eroded. Between 1965 and 1985, AFDC caseloads had increased 270 percent despite general increases in standards of living in the nation at large. The Food Stamp Program went from a small commodity distribution program to a transfer program with two times as many recipients as AFDC. Medicaid (introduced in 1965) had a caseload larger than the Food Stamp Program. Total real spending on means-tested programs had increased by about 230 percent, to about 3.5 percent of GDP. Participants in AFDC seemed increasingly unattached to the labor market and to prosperity in the nation at large. The percentage of recipients working fell from 14.5 percent in 1969 to 6.4 percent by 1993, while average earned income of recipients fell by about one-third from 1976 to 1992.

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Concerns about the effects of welfare programs on family structure were also growing. For example, more than half of female-headed households received AFDC, food stamps, or Medicaid, and 25 percent received all three. By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of two-parent families received any assistance, with over half of those receiving unemployment assistance only. The proportion of single women on welfare who had never been married quadrupled in 16 years, to over 1.5 million by 1992. Of course, welfare programs cannot be evaluated simply on the basis of numbers of participants, work effort, and family structure. The goal of the policies is the reduction of poverty, not reduction of caseloads. Thus, if welfare programs had effectively reduced poverty, that benefit should be weighed against the other, negative outcomes associated with welfare programs. Unfortunately, once economists try to separate the effects of welfare programs from other influences, the balance of evidence indicates that traditional welfare programs did little to reduce poverty. A significant reduction in poverty rates occurred during the 1960s, but much of that reduction—about half—came in the economic boom before the 1965 introduction of the Great Society programs. This boom continued past the end of the decade and may well be responsible for most of the further reductions in poverty during the 1960s. Poverty rates in the succeeding twenty years had a very weak and inconsistent relationship to the generosity of antipoverty programs. Poverty rates fell from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent between 1960 and 1970, but thereafter wandered between 12.3 and 15 percent until the late 1990s, despite changes in poverty programs. African American poverty rates fell to 33.5 percent by 1970, but stayed in the low-to-mid-30s range until the mid-1990s. Perhaps more troubling, after 1970 the relationship between poverty and the general health of the American economy seemed to have been severed. In the past, prosperity had generally raised all ships, and economic decline had been shared to some extent by a broad spectrum of Americans. After around 1970, prosperity and recession came and went, but poverty measures showed a stubborn resistance to change. A large group of Americans had been removed from participation in the fortunes of the general economy. If the goal of welfare programs was to reduce poverty among female-headed families, then the great growth in the number of these families, and the enduring poverty among American children, indicates that the policies had not met their goal. An evaluation of the specific approach to poverty that the United States pursued in the past is not a general indictment of governmental attempts to fight poverty. As we have just seen, poverty is not randomly distributed, but falls disproportionately on females and nonwhites. Poverty cannot be viewed as the natural and fair outcome of free interactions in a well-functioning dynamic market. In a fair market, race and gender are irrelevant characteristics.

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They are not irrelevant in America. As we endorse group action to end other forms of unfair practice to improve our markets—prosecuting organized crime, regulating bankers, arresting counterfeiters—so, taking group action to end the unfair impedance of human potential is a promarket, pro-freedomof-enterprise policy. Just as we do not expect prosecution of criminals or control of the currency to be a spontaneous, voluntary activity, no reason exists to insist that care of the poor should be a matter of private charity only. Thus, conservatives should like the idea of generous welfare programs if they can be made effective. Effectiveness should be the relevant measure for people of all political leanings, and, as of the mid-1980s, it appeared that we still had much to learn about making welfare programs effective. The first round of modern welfare reform came with the George H. W. Bush and early Clinton administrations. These reforms were grounded in the hope that a different mix of policies might have fewer negative effects while having a greater positive effect on poverty. Many believed that the stinginess of welfare benefits, combined with rules for participation that discouraged industry among recipients, were part of the problem. Four major policy changes in just five years increased spending nearly as much as in the 1960s and early 1970s. All of the program changes of this era were aimed at combining more generosity with improved incentives. Because traditional AFDC tended to exclude the working poor and thus create a disincentive to work, the EITC was dramatically expanded, tripling its funding. In addition, eligibility for Medicaid expanded, mainly to single mothers and their children leaving AFDC, in order to reduce the incentive to remain on AFDC just to gain health insurance. Spending on Medicaid grew by 88 percent. The Food Stamp Program budget grew by 42 percent. Significant expansions took place in the caseload of the SSI program (targeted at the elderly and disabled), mainly due to increased numbers of disabled adults and children. The Family Support Act of 1988 mandated work, education, and training for AFDC recipients and funded new spending on work-related programs. These changes were expected to reduce participation in AFDC by replacing some AFDC spending with other forms of support that encouraged work.5 Many people of faith believed that these changes would calibrate the American welfare system to more nearly reflect biblical norms for right social relationships, while also encouraging virtue among recipients. To the great surprise and dismay of many, the number of recipients of AFDC increased suddenly, by about 40 percent between 1989 and 1993. Some increase might have been expected because of the 1991–1992 recession, but the increase was far out of proportion to the increases during prior, deeper recessions.6 Disaffection for welfare was now widely shared throughout the American class structure. A majority of welfare recipients reported that the system was doing more harm than good. A surprising

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broad-based agreement about the general directions that reform should take developed. The large majority, including the majority of recipients, favored a major reform that would include work requirements and public subsidies to help recipients’ transitions into work. Polls indicated that most Americans were not motivated by appeals to their wallets. The main concern was not for fraud or expense but the tendency of welfare to encourage irresponsible lifestyles and values. This groundswell of intuitive opinion was, by an unusual turn of good fortune, accompanied by an opportunity for economists to cast fresh light on the most effective ways to answer the public call for change. At about the same time that President G. H. W. Bush began expanding spending on means-tested programs, the Federal government also expanded the program of “state waivers.” States were allowed to apply for permission to experiment with the structure and administration of their welfare programs. Pressure for this freedom to experiment often came from state governors (including then-governor Bill Clinton), as expanding AFDC populations put pressure on state budgets. Over half of the states received waivers from the traditional federal AFDC formulas. These waiver experiments were crucial to the future direction of welfare reform because the states that received waivers were required to fund a serious evaluation of their new programs. These were usually randomassignment evaluations, which are as close to true controlled experiments as we get in social science. These waivers and evaluations yielded detailed information about the apparent effect of specific policy changes. They offer an unusually rich source of information for people who know that care of the needy is essential but still wonder about the most effective way to exercise that care. State waiver experiments gave particular attention to two policy options. Mandatory employment programs (welfare-to-work, work first, and workfare programs) required participants to take part in placement services, brief job training, or actual work in order to qualify for benefits, rather than emphasizing long-term education and training. Earnings disregards and other financial-incentive programs imitated some features of the EITC by disregarding some income earned by participants when determining their eligibility for support, or by otherwise providing a wage subsidy to increase the attractiveness of work. Most waivers from the mid-1980s onward included the first option— mandatory work for all people deemed to be work eligible. Nearly all of these experiments produced significant increases in employment and reductions in AFDC participation and payments. This was not surprising. However, other outcomes in these experiments were unexpected. Many had expected that this approach would be hardest on the most marginalized citizens. Surprisingly, the most disadvantaged participants experienced

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about the same employment and earnings gains as less-disadvantaged participants. Employment outcomes (such as wages and hours hired) were neither significantly worse among the less-skilled participants, nor among those with clear barriers to work, such as child-care problems.7 Another surprise was that programs pushing recipients quickly into jobs, with little training or education, increased earnings and decreased welfare dependence more quickly than the more expensive programs that emphasized training and education. Many women who participated in welfare programs experienced bigger gains from work experience than from formal education or training.8 The bad news was that these mandatory work programs showed little evidence of increased income and reduced poverty. Earnings in simple work-first programs were generally offset, dollar-for-dollar, by reductions in public support, with no net effect on poverty. Other states, however, (and two Canadian provinces) had combined mandatory work with earningsdisregards and other earnings subsidies. The Minnesota (1994) and Canadian (1992) programs created enough control groups to explicitly compare the combined and separate effects of work requirements and earnings disregards. These experiments yielded a strong conclusion: Work requirements combined with earnings disregards had the net effect of increasing work while also reducing poverty. These programs generally did not reduce the cost to the state budget. They also did not cut the incidence of welfare usage because more people continued to be eligible for benefits as their incomes rose, but these programs did shift benefits from nonworkers to workers, and they did decrease poverty. Many worry that reforms requiring work will negatively affect poor children who may now receive less attention from their working parent. When child outcomes were measured along with earnings, employment, and poverty, the earnings-supplement programs were associated with significant improvements in school achievement and child behaviors for elementary school children, especially among long-term welfare recipient families.9 The mandatory-work-only programs did not show these positive results. Though these programs did not reduce the state’s welfare budget, they did make state spending much more effective. The ratio of reduction-in-poverty per dollar-spent is vastly superior to the less expensive work-requirement programs.10 These programs that combined work requirements with earnings disregards are not panaceas. For example, they are only effective when work is available; many Canadians did not take up participation when offered, unable to find the requisite thirty hours per week of work. Additionally, though the average outcomes are encouraging, a fairly wide variance of results came about, indicating that programs are best targeted at subpopulations for which they work best.

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The fourth era in our historical survey, from the mid-1990s to the present, brought program changes in five areas. AFDC was dramatically restructured and renamed TANF (Temporary Assistance to Need Families). The program received less overall funding, though per-family benefits were expected to increase because of the program’s other fundamental changes. Medicaid was restructured and became more generous. The EITC was restructured and became more generous, with expenditures larger than AFDC. SSI became more generous without being significantly restructured. Finally, charitable choice legislation affected the way in which social services are delivered. Several important things happened in the background during this period, complementing welfare reform. The minimum wage rose by 10.8 percent from 1989 to 1997, even after adjusting for inflation. The general economy was exceptionally strong in the late 1990s, shrinking welfare caseloads. Unemployment rates remained under 5 percent, and wages among less-skilled workers began rising in 1995 for the first time since the late 1970s.11 In addition, access to public health insurance was increasingly decoupled from income assistance, so that by the end of the 1990s all children in families with incomes below the poverty line were eligible for Medicaid.12 The first welfare-reform volley of this period was a major expansion of the EITC by Congress in 1993.13 Together with increased minimum wages, this raised the after-inflation minimum-wage full-time earnings of a woman with one child by 19.7 percent during the 1990s, from $10,568 in 1998 to $12,653 in 2000. Women with two or more children experienced a 34.3 percent increase. The strong economy also meant that more women experienced these improvements. Although increases in the minimum wage have the potential to cause layoffs, it appears that this happened mainly for low-skilled teenaged workers. Thus, these changes substantially increased work incentives for low-income women with children, and their labor-force participation rates rose markedly.14 These indirect welfare reform measures were followed by welfare reform legislation: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. It made several changes. Federal welfare rules were devolved to the states, institutionalizing the idea of designing poverty programs at the state level within Federal guidelines. Many states diverted some eligible citizens from cash assistance. Ten states imposed work-search requirements for eligibility. Twelve states set up temporary short-term cash payments that did not count toward time limits. Nine states adopted both approaches. States shifted support toward noncash services such as child care. (Between 1993 and 2000, for example, child-care subsidies nearly doubled, from $9.5 billion to $18 billion. Transportation and job-search expenses were also often expanded.) Yet, in most places, cash benefit levels for the nonworking changed very little.

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The nature of Federal funding changed. Under AFDC, Federal funding moved up and down with state funding. Under TANF, states receive a fixed grant each year based on the previous level of AFDC funding. To avoid a “race to the bottom,” states were required to spend at least 75 percent of their AFDC budget on TANF programs to receive full funding. States could use some TANF funds for child care rather than income subsidies. The Child Care Tax Credit was expanded for lower-middle income families. Although the size of the block grants was slightly smaller than AFDC funding, these grants were fixed over time. The strategy correctly anticipated that, as the number of participants shrank under the new policies, the funding per participant would rise. Fears that block grants would reduce state spending did not materialize. PRWORA established work requirements. By 2002, at least 50 percent of a state’s 1997 caseload were expected to be working, in work-preparation programs, or no longer receiving support. General education or training did not count toward this requirement,15 so the emphasis remained on workfirst rather than long-term training. The new system incorporated time limits on recipients. The first word in the new program’s name is temporary, which signals a major shift in philosophy. Even though AFDC was often temporary in practice, TANF is temporary by design. Federal income assistance comes with a lifetime limit of five years. States are free to set shorter time limits, or to continue funding any family for longer than sixty months out of their own state revenues, or to set limits on the length of each individual spell of participation. States may also exempt up to 20 percent of their 1997 caseload from these federal time limits as not yet work-ready. The best guess (still quite soft) is that perhaps 10 percent of the caseload decline post-1996 is due to time limits.16 Some elements of welfare reform addressed family structure. Much of the legislation’s language was directed to this issue (i.e., to reducing outof-wedlock births and encouraging marriage). Actual program changes to this end were more limited. PRWORA allows for family caps on benefits (no benefits for children born to families receiving support) and requirements that teen mothers stay in school and live in a supervised setting. States that experienced falling illegitimacy rates without rising abortion rates received special funding bonuses. Several changes also encouraged establishment of paternity at birth, and improved collection of child support from absent parents. New restrictions were instituted that related to place of birth. Legal immigrants arriving after August 1996 were generally denied access to TANF, Food Stamps, and SSI, usually for a period of about ten years. Finally, charitable choice provisions were instituted. This legislation aims to affect the provision of services by allowing faith-based and community

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organizations to compete on an equal footing with other providers for some government-issued social-service contracts (such as employment searches, job training, marriage or budget counseling, community services, and drugtreatment programs). Recipients of programs from faith-based organizations must be served without religious or other discrimination, may not be forced to participate in inherently religious activities, and must be offered a secular alternative if they object to a faith-based provider. All government funds must be used to fulfill the specific public social-service goals, and may not be used for inherently religious activities.

EVALUATING WELFARE REFORM Economists can offer some guidance on separating welfare reform effects from the general economy’s influence. A great deal of research has also investigated the effects of PRWORA on caseloads, employment, poverty, and family structure. These categories give us a partial window into questions of virtuous behavior in a rightly ordered culture. The effect of any particular PRWORA change is difficult to separate from the other changes because so many things were altered simultaneously in 1996. Some effects, however, have become clearer as time has passed, and economists also have employed some modeling and statistical tools to tease out individual program effects. The emerging consensus is that the reforms have had a significant effect on behavior beyond that of the strong economy. For example, after 1996, the decline in the nationwide unemployment rate slowed, but the decline in participation in TANF accelerated. In comparison, during the era of strong economic growth between 1983 and 1989, AFDC caseloads changed little. The best estimates seem to be that somewhere between 10 percent and 30 percent of the reductions in TANF caseloads after 1996 are attributable to the economy rather than the welfare-policy changes, though it is likely that the two reinforced each other. Given that welfare reform had a significant independent effect on the poor, we can try to measure that effect. No one of any political persuasion would have predicted—or even believed possible—the magnitude of change that occurred in the behavior of low-income single-parent families during the 1990s. Participation in TANF (caseloads) declined, beginning in the early 1990s and accelerating after welfare reform, falling to late-1960s levels. Between 1994 and 2000, caseloads fell by 56.5 percent, and the declines occurred in every state. But, by itself, this tells us little. The point of having poverty programs is not to make them inaccessible, but rather to maintain incentives for work and other responsible behaviors while reducing poverty.

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First, consider work choices. Employment rates of single mothers have soared. Single mothers showed little change in labor-force participation rates from 1980 through the early-1990s, despite significant variations in the health of the general economy. The recent welfare reforms significantly altered the nature of federal poverty support: Between 1988 and 1999, the federal money that supports working poor families17 increased from $11 billion to $66.7 billion (in inflation-adjusted, 2002 dollars). Compare this to cash support to nonelderly, nondisabled, largely nonworking adults: $24 billion in 1988, $27 billion in 1992, $13 billion in 1999. These changes altered work incentives. Work effort by single mothers rose significantly, including work among women who remained on welfare. The share with earnings rose from 6.7 percent in 1990 to 28.1 percent in 1999.18 Even with over one million less-skilled women entering the labor force by way of welfare reform, wages among less-skilled women rose throughout the 1990s to their highest point in several decades, while female unemployment rates fell to their lowest levels in several decades. This trend in wages continued even through the recession of 2001–2002. Of course, increases in work might not reduce poverty, and might actually increase poverty if earnings do not replace lost welfare benefits. We must consider changes in total incomes and poverty since welfare reform.19 The national poverty rate improved, falling below the historic low of 8.8 percent in 1974. The decline was more rapid among single-mother families than in the population at large, and it dropped to new record lows for all ethnic groupings. After decades of little change, the poverty rate among single-female-headed households fell by 30 percent between 1992 and 2000. The rate among African American single-female-headed households fell by 31 percent, with exactly the same decline among Hispanic singlefemale-headed households. Though fewer people are below the poverty threshold, their increase in income has often been moderate, and there remain serious problems. Poverty rates are still disturbingly high among ethnic minorities. Poverty rates also fell less quickly than participation fell; combined with the increase in work effort, this yields the ironic result that the share of working poor in the U.S. population increased. Some families left TANF but still remained poor. How have the general improvements in incomes been spread throughout the poverty population? One way of approaching this topic is to consider the poverty gaps, the distance between the poverty line and the average income of families that are still poor. The change in welfare policies in the 1990s apparently led to a slight rise in the poverty gap (based on after-tax incomes), from $1,447 to $1,524.20 Fewer people were in poverty, but for those who were, poverty on average seems to have slightly worsened.21 At least half of those leaving TANF have incomes below the poverty line when

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they leave, and roughly 40 percent still have incomes below the poverty level five years after leaving. Among legal immigrants, who were made ineligible for virtually all federal public assistance in 1996, there was likely a substantial loss of well-being, though this area is remarkably understudied.22 On the other hand, the data on poverty gaps and deep poverty consider only reported income, not actual consumption (ability to spend) among the poor. We do have evidence of multiple sources of (at least temporary) income for poor families, and by triangulating from consumption surveys and employer pay records we know that some income is not fully reported. Toward the bottom of the income distribution, the discrepancy appears to be on the order of 50–100 percent underreporting. Data on consumer expenditures in fact show increasing consumption spending through the 1990s, even among very low-income families with children.23 Regarding family structure, even under the old AFDC program research found a surprisingly small effect of the program on out-of-wedlock births. The long-term changes in family structure seem to be driven by other things (such as increases in female job opportunities and the relative decline in unskilled male wages). Thus, we might expect small effects of welfare reform here, especially because few changes were directly aimed at family structure.24 Indeed, only muted evidence exists that welfare reform per se has had any effect on family structure. Marriage and divorce rates seem to be drifting along their long-term trends. Birth rates to unmarried women did start to change around 1990, beginning a slow decline among both African Americans and whites, and among both older and younger women, but these trends seem to have begun well before welfare reform. Generally, though birth rates to unmarried women have been falling, the share of families headed by never-married mothers has increased steadily, from 3 percent in 1976 to over 10 percent now.25 The share of children living with single mothers (especially in African American families) did decline significantly in the late 1990s. Family caps, the main reform that might affect family structure, appear to have had very little if any effect on out-of-wedlock birth rates. This might have been expected, because the forgone benefits lost under family caps are relatively small—on the order of $60 per month.26 On the other hand, the Minnesota waiver program found that single mothers in the program married at a significantly higher rate than in the control study, and that two-parent families in the program stayed married at a higher rate. Careful studies of these family-structure changes are few and far between, and they are complicated by the fact that a time lag exists between policy changes and birth-rate responses. In sum, we have limited evidence on welfare reform’s effect on family structure, and no clear evidence about which policies most influence marriage and fertility.

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The jury is still out regarding charitable choice. Many state and local governments have been slow to implement the law, and President Clinton further slowed implementation by issuing executive orders that contracts could not go to “pervasively sectarian” service providers. President Bush has reversed this executive interpretation of the law, but Charitable Choice still governs only a few federal programs. Limited evaluations have focused on the relative effectiveness of faith-based providers (finding that they are generally at least as effective as their secular peers), and the providers’ experiences in navigating government contracts (finding relatively few problems, despite complaints about dealing with bureaucracy, timing of payments, and excessive paperwork requirements).

WHERE SHALL WE GO FROM HERE? Reforms have tried to expand the possibilities for and incentives toward responsible choices, and their effects are largely positive (though in some cases disappointingly small) in the effort to build a rightly-ordered culture that values and promotes personal virtue. One might conclude that the next step should be to further improve incentives and expand possibilities for choice. I think this may be the right instinct, but we must be precise about just what is required in order to expand families’ range of choices. At their best Christian social reformers have balanced the role of the individual and the role of social structures. The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of several such reform movements, to a great extent grounded in the principles of the Second Great Awakening. The temperance movement, the first and most widespread of the reform movements, emphasized self-discipline and self-control. Beyond personal pledges of self-discipline, the movement worked to see social alternatives increased: alcohol-free hotels and transportation, limits on the promotion and availability of alcohol, sobriety pledges at workplaces. By 1840, alcohol consumption fell to less than half the 1830 level. However, reform did not end with calls to personal virtue. Movements to reform education and prisons, to abolish slavery, and to establish women’s rights sprang from the same seeds. Change in these areas came more slowly than in the temperance movement, but over time American society began to fundamentally change. The welfare reforms considered here should be merely the opening act in exploring how to construct modern parallels of these five other reform movements. We are probably farthest along in the movement to reform public education. In this area, we are surrounded by active experiments and reforms, and we have some cause to be hopeful.

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A modern temperance movement would not only build support against the abuse of drugs and alcohol, but would also address the stunning changes in sexual ethics, pornography, and standards for greediness during the last generation. A modern prison reform movement would reconsider the fairness of the American justice system. When year after year one-sixth of marriage-aged black men are incarcerated, we should not be that surprised at the pressures that are created against stable family life. It is increasingly hard to believe that this disproportionate African American imprisonment rate is the result of a fair application of the law. Consider the disproportionate number of black men on death rows, and the considerable proportion of them who are being cleared by DNA evidence. The modern equivalents of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements would focus on basic restructuring of society in areas where some are systematically put at a disadvantage.27 In many cases overt discrimination still limits possibilities. Zoning laws, lending practices, and school funding formulas still tend to concentrate poverty and affluence into separated, self-perpetuating spheres. There have been real gains in the last generation, but there is much yet to do if we adopt a theologically informed standpoint concerning virtuous persons in a well-ordered society.

NOTES 1. I am in debt to two excellent reviews of the research literature by the two leading economists on the topic of welfare reform: Robert Moffitt, “Incentive Effects of the U.S. Welfare System: A Review,” Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992): 1–61, and Rebecca Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States, Working Paper 8983 (Boston: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002). For survey results and an understanding of the political process leading to welfare reform, I am indebted to Gary Bryner, Politics and Public Morality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). All data are drawn from Moffit and Blank, or from calculations by the author using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002, 121st ed. (Washington, D.C., 2001). 2. For a detailed introduction to the themes of this paragraph, see Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985). 3. Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), presents an introduction to the themes of this and the next paragraph. 4. Direct income-support accounts for about 9 percent of total Federal spending; the implicit income redistribution through Social Security and Medicare comprises another 27 percent of total spending. 5. AFDC had been the largest means-tested program in the 1960s, but by the mid-1990s was a distant fifth behind Medicaid, SSI, EITC, and Food Stamps.

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6. Compare increases of under 10 percent in the mid-1970s, around 10 percent in the early 1980s. Gary Bryner, Politics and Public Morality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 6. 7. There is an exception: those at a high risk of depression experienced significant difficulties in maintaining employment. 8. Some evidence exists that subgroups of women do benefit more from immediate training than work-first, and that many benefit from training after several years of work-first, but no programs of this kind have been evaluated with randomized experiments. 9. Older children show smaller and less positive results. 10. Canada and Minnesota generated $2–$2.50 in income for long-term recipients per $1 spent in the program on earnings disregards; by contrast, simple workrequirement programs have a ratio in the range of $0.50 to –$0.50. 11. Wages among less-skilled women continued to rise, amazingly, through the 1991–1992 recession, increasing by 5 percent during 1992. 12. About half the states set higher income levels for cutoff from the program; pregnant women and children under five have access federally through 133 percent of the poverty line. 13. The EITC is very popular in both parties because it raises wages while encouraging people to participate in work, yet without forcing employers to pay higher wages—which might reduce the number of jobs available. It is not a panacea. The EITC involves a marriage penalty at some earnings levels, though the research suggests little effect on actual marriage patterns. It creates a fairly high marginal tax rate for those who work enough to receive the maximum subsidy (77 precent of the total eligible pool), which likely encourages some people to remain in low-wage or parttime jobs rather than move up the wage ladder. (Research suggests at least a slight negative effect on work of married women for this reason and of both women and men in two-earner households.) In order to maintain reasonable marginal tax rates, the subsidy continues to two-child-family incomes over $30,000, which is well up the income distribution. It is also believed that there are frequent overpayments (of around 25 percent of tax expenditures) in the program, mostly due to inaccurate claims for qualifying children. (Compare 17 percent of taxes not paid overall to the IRS, and over 25 percent nonpayment for some capital-income and informalsector income.) The subsidy also reaches only those who properly file for it; among eligible single mothers, this is around 42–54 percent of the total eligible pool, but many of the same effects exist, and are larger, with the other more traditional approaches to income assistance. 14. In principle, it seemed clear that a woman off welfare, receiving full-time earnings, the EITC, Food Stamps (FS), child care assistance, and child support would be substantially better off than under the old AFDC program. In fact, the aim of policy was that any family with one adult working forty-hour weeks at minimum wage would, by combining earnings, EITC and Food Stamps, and Medicaid, be lifted above the poverty level. In practice, this has not quite happened universally, partly because steady full-time work was not always possible to maintain, and partly because of difficulties in accessing programs, especially Food Stamps. AFDC participation was traditionally the gateway to other forms of in-kind support such as Food Stamps. As support has shifted from AFDC to work-related support, access to FS has not success-

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fully shifted with it. Offices are often only open during daytime work hours; FS benefits change monthly as earnings change, and this creates complexity for caseworkers that they would often prefer to avoid by getting workers off the FS rolls; asset rules for eligibility (like car resale value) reduce eligibility. Participation by eligible families with a working adult head was only 43 percent in 1999 (from 71 percent in 1998), while 70 percent of eligible nonearners participated. Even among the very poor who leave TANF (income below 50 percent of poverty line), only about half continue to receive FS, though all are still eligible. There is some hopeful sign in that rates of decline in FS use were similar to those in TANF for 1994–1998, but FS use fell much less steeply after 1998. Programs are in place to reduce this nonparticipation in FS (and in Medicaid as well). 15. This does not apply to mothers under age eighteen without a high school degree. 16. Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform, 48. 17. EITC, child-care assistance, Medicaid, CHIP, but not including job training/ placement or cash benefits. 18. Between half and two-thirds of those leaving income support appear to be working within three months. Mothers with multiple barriers—such as substance abuse, health problems, depression, low work skills, or domestic violence—work less frequently than others; about 20 percent of leavers appear to not have worked in the four year period after participation. Thus, most leavers find jobs, though jobholding is sometimes not continuous; most have no more than two unemployment spells within four years of leaving, and employers are found to rate welfare recipients as performing as well or better than other employees (Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform, 52). 19. Our measures are unfortunately less precise than we might wish. We would like a comprehensive measure of total well being, including levels of health insurance access, housing, food, crime, mental health, education for children, and children’s schooling and behavior outcomes. Reliable consistent data on such things are difficult to find and aggregate. So economists usually consider several alternatives. 20. Blank, “Evaluating Welfare Reform,” table 4 gives poverty gaps between 1993 and 1999. 21. Said differently, the incomes of the vast majority of single mothers—certainly over 80 percent of them—rose after 1996; but deep poverty—those with incomes at under half the poverty level—appears to have also risen somewhat in the late 1990s. Average annual income in this deep-poverty group has declined by perhaps $600. 22. We do know that use of public assistance has fallen suddenly among immigrants (the share receiving fell almost in half, 1994–1998), and that FS receipt among eligible citizen children living with immigrant parents fell from 80 percent in 1994 to 46 percent in 1999. 23. Total consumption among single mothers increased in the mid-1990s, absolutely, relative to women without children, and relative to married mothers. Food-related problems declined between 1995 and 1999 for single mothers, and declined as rapidly as they did among other poor groups. 24. On the other hand, the AFDC-related studies compared changes in benefit levels across states to changes in birth rates. PRWORA did not take its effect primarily through changes in benefit levels; it changed a great number of behavioral incen-

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tives, so that the indirect effect on birth rates might have conceivably been larger than the effect of changing AFDC benefit levels. In the end, it appears not. 25. Among those with lower incomes or less education, the rate of increase slowed somewhat in the late 1990s. 26. These benefit-cap studies are reinforced by research on the Teen Parent Demonstration Project in Ohio, which required teen welfare mothers to participate in a set of education and work support programs. The project appears to have had no effect on second pregnancies; Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform, 81. 27. One reasonable area for action would be a concerted effort at finding creative ways to make work pay. Raising the wages of the lowest-paid workers, assuring them of basic health insurance as they seek employment, and creating job security so they do not bear the brunt of economic downturns would all be natural and important extensions of the lessons learned from welfare reform. Yet, it seems obvious that something more creative than “living wage” laws will be necessary. Simply legislating that wages must double or triple is very likely counter-productive for those most in need.

9 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure: A Case Study of Great Barrier Island, New Zealand1 Janel M. Curry

How can our understanding of ourselves and our moral understanding be deepened to account for our membership in societies that are embedded in particular places, which are, in turn, embedded within ecosystems? This question reflects the challenge within academia and faith communities of understanding humans as placed simultaneously within societal structures and within nature in a way that neither negates the uniqueness of humans, created in the image of God, nor denigrates the value of God’s creation. The challenge is the full integration of humans, society, and nature into the vision of shalom that God intends—an integration that is crucial for our decisions on how to structure our lives in relation to the earth. Theological thinking on the environment has come a long way from the time of Lynn White’s classic article, “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis.”2 Writings on the theological and philosophical understanding of our relationship with the earth have grown. In addition, our scientific understanding of the impact of humans and the workings of nature has increased. The challenge for all—whether faith communities, scientific communities, secular environmental communities, or combinations of the previous—is the full conceptual and practical integration of society and nature. Views on the nature of reality, particularly views on the relationship between nature and humans, or what is often called the nature-culture boundary, have concrete expression in policies that shape both this regulation and commodification of nature. For example, a legal system that emphasizes individual property rights results in a society that also emphasizes the boundary among individuals over against a more communal sense of property and personhood. Natural resource management policy has to involve 151

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drawing exactly these sorts of boundaries among different groups of people and between the social and the natural. Such choices are not timeless, predetermined absolutes but choices reflecting and shaping societal beliefs and worldviews.

CASE STUDY This study in natural resource management, focused on oceans management on Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, starts with the assumption of the nonreducibility of morality, social structures, and the earth and has the goal of extending our understanding of this wholeness. The study incorporated both policy analysis and data from fieldwork conducted in the marine-resource-dependent community of northern Great Barrier Island, New Zealand. The policy analysis derives from documents obtained while in residence at Victoria University in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. In addition, government officials and representatives of several ocean-related interest groups participated in interviews. These people included several representatives of the fisheries industry, including the lobbyist for the Rock Lobster Association. Several people who work with Forest and Bird, one of the most effective and powerful environmental groups in New Zealand, also participated in interviews as well as government officials from the Ministry for Environment and Department of Conservation (DOC). The local case study involved four weeks of fieldwork on Great Barrier Island (Aotea). The research conducted on northern Great Barrier Island involved forty local participants who represented a range of interest groups. While the number of individuals involved in this study was not large, it did represent a significant proportion of the adult population from the island’s northern section. Key informants identified participants who represented a variety of interests, including the DOC, commercial lobster fishing, mussel farming, tourism, agriculture, health care workers, teachers, and individuals who represented a range within the Maori community. Great Barrier Island is approximately sixty miles off the coast from Auckland, New Zealand. The island is approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) by 15 miles (22 kilometers) in size and has a population of less than 1,000 people.3 Highly dependent on marine resources for its economy, life on the island has been transformed through the development of a market and property-rights based marine-resource policy regime driven by globalization.4 Policy regimes both reflect and transform relationships among people and between nature and culture. Beginning in the 1980s, fisheries policy across the world moved toward closed access to fisheries through the development of new forms of property rights, an approach called rights-based

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management. These changes have been made in the context of a global emphasis on market-based approaches to resource. New Zealand’s rights-based system of management is its Quota Management System (QMS). It has two key structural pillars: Total Allowable Catch (TAC) and Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ). Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) are transferable property rights allocated to fishers in the form of a “right of harvest” up to a particular tonnage of a species from a defined region. In addition, a permit is necessary to commercially harvest fish controlled by the QMS. To be eligible for a permit, commercial fishers must hold minimum quota amounts such as three tons for rock lobster and shellfish per quota management area or region (QMA).5 The QMS, as it has been implemented in New Zealand, illustrates how the bounding of property—reflecting a particular set of assumptions regarding the relationship between society and nature—has an impact on relationships among people and the natural world. The QMS divides nature into pieces—pieces that are legally bounded. Ownership of pieces is individualized. For the purpose of establishing these property rights, nature is divided into single species catch by ton. Noncommercial species are set outside these boundaries. Minimum species quota for a license also has constructed human interests by individual species and amount. The Individualized Quota tonnage is also regionalized under the QMS. This regionalized ownership has further reordered who fishers are in relationship with; putting together regions as joint exploiters. These regions may bear no relationship to prior social relations. Great Barrier Island’s quota management area covers the entire northeast portion of the North Island. In the past, the small boats out of Great Barrier Island were limited to a relatively small area by their size, yet the quota system has opened up Great Barrier Island fishing grounds to those from off the island. Furthermore, after a decade or more under the quota system, the option of returning to a locally controlled system is no longer viable because of the individualistic decision-making that resulted from the QMS. A local resident talked about how giving power to the local fisherman to manage the island fisheries at this point would not work because locals did not have the informal management system—the relationships—in place that was there fifty years ago. Finally, and significantly, the QMS has changed the relationship between local catch and commercial sales of catch. The QMS requires that the catch around Great Barrier Island be recorded in Auckland. This means, among other things, that local restaurants cannot buy from local fishers. This has increased the social distance among locals on Great Barrier Island as well as increased the distance between nature and humans. No longer can locally caught fish be sold directly into the local economy. The relationships have to be funneled through Auckland.

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The impact of New Zealand’s QMS on social boundaries is particularly significant on those at the margins of society who often live along coastal margins. For example, the QMS undermined the survival strategy of life of Great Barrier Island that involved part-time, multiple jobs. Individuals in places such as Great Barrier Island have had a strategy for survival that involves crossing the land-ocean boundary as well as crossing standard employment boundaries through part-time employment and multiple jobs. This strategy sustained communities and has been particularly true of the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori.6 Great Barrier Island is a microcosm of the larger changes brought by the QMS. In the early 1990s, Great Barrier Island had twenty-five locally owned fishing boats and another fifteen from the mainland that unloaded catch on the island. By 2002, only two full-time resident fishermen remained. Commercial fishers were either forced out of fishing because they could not establish their right to quota, or they were given amounts of quota that were under the limit to obtain a permit to fish, partially the result of employment strategies.7 The Quota Management System policy offers a clear example of a policy that views nature and society as divisible and boundable. Nature is not seen as tied to the local human community. In fact, the interests of the local community are seen as biased. The market, enhanced by the QMS distribution of property rights to individuals, is thought to serve as the morally neutral arbitrator of the distribution of goods. Thus, in order for policy to be rational and disinterested, decision-making must be protected from the interests of the local community, thus protecting policy from any relational notion of personhood, whether with other people or a local ecological system.

FISHERIES, BOUNDARIES, AND MARINE RESERVES Scholars have noted that for each move toward economic liberalism, such as seen in the QMS, there is a countermovement toward social protection.8 This idea can also be applied to nature-culture relationships. In the case of the commodification of nature as seen in the QMS in New Zealand, this countermove is toward environmental preservation. An emphasis on freedom through the QMS system has led to a countermove of restrictions on freedom through the establishment of marine reserves as no-take zones. The development of marine reserves on the surface appears to be the opposite of the division and portioning of nature via the QMS. However, both assume very rigid nature-culture boundaries in which humans are not seen to be integrated with nature but rather separate. Great Barrier Island has also been subject to this policy of preservation. New Zealand passed a Marine Reserves law whose purpose was to establish a series of marine reserves in response to worries about overfishing and

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decreasing marine biodiversity. The New Zealand government is committed to putting 10 percent of New Zealand’s marine environment in reserves as a way to preserve biodiversity. To date, only 0.1 percent of the coastline is protected within fifteen marine reserves.9 The most isolated part of Great Barrier Island is the northeastern tip, with more populated ports and sheltered areas on the western shore. The isolation of this area, combined with the Department of Conservation’s ownership of much of the land in this area, has led to a proposal to make a portion of the area a marine reserve. The creation of this reserve has been controversial, and the debate surrounding its possible establishment illustrates, again, differing views on nature-culture relationships. The Department of Conservation and the marine reserve legislation emphasize no-take marine protected areas, separating the human community from nature. This separation is based on a view of nature-culture that concludes that humans must be removed from nature to ensure the protection of biodiversity. This implies that humans exploit nature through their action, leaving it in a degraded state. Thus, in order to save nature, we must set a “boundary between pristine wilderness and modified, humanized stretches of land.”10 This preservation is based on scientific justifications.11 In interviews with locals on Great Barrier Island, it was clear that they did not perceive such a strict separation between nature and the human community but view reality as the integration of nature and the human community with community health and the well-being of the surrounding environment intertwined. They would often speak of how the management of the environment around them was directly related to the health of the community and economy. In this view of reality, science does not stand apart from the political but includes deeply held values, values based on assumptions that all parties need to discuss.12 Thus, their exclusion from meaningful participation in decisions related to the management of the environmental was a constant area of frustration. Debates over the establishment of a marine reserve on Great Barrier Island illustrate the same largely modernist, nature-culture dichotomy seen in fisheries management. The proposal assumes a spatial dichotomy between the protection of the inside from the threat by those outside and a clear distinction between nature and culture.13

MUSSEL FARMS The picture of nature inherent in, and established by, the QMS has changed social relations on Great Barrier Island. The QMS splits nature into pieces of a bundle of property rights. These property rights have been distributed in such a way as to transform social relations between people

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and the nonhuman world and relations among people. The countermove has been to create more protected areas. Science has been a part of this process of division, tending to fragment both biological and human systems into parts in the application of management policies. This leaves science and policy grasping for means for reconnecting the pieces of nature into a whole and reconnecting this whole with human society.14 What, then, integrates these pieces back into some kind of whole? Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of government in New Zealand since the 1980s, sees the free market as the integrator.15 The market is expected to behave as the mediator of boundaries, and the individual thus contributes to the community via market competitiveness. Yet, rationalistic and marketoriented policy structures allow for no local consideration to be taken into account in terms of who gets the benefits of policy. Such considerations are thought to be biased. The proposed expansion of aquaculture for mussel farms around Great Barrier Island shows these tensions within this structuring of policy. Mussel farming is one of the major commercial fishing industries on Great Barrier Island, with tremendous pressures for expansion due to high prices and the high quality that can be produced on the island. Green lipped mussels are grown on lines suspended from floats on the surface of the water and such mussel farms on Great Barrier Island produce fifteen hundred tons annually.16 The Auckland Regional Council (ARC), the local planning entity, grants permits for the establishment of such aquacultural farms. However, ARC is not allowed to take into account the residency of the applicant into its decision-making. If a local person gets such a license, they are allowed to turn around and sell it to a nonlocal person at a huge profit. Policy structures allow for no local consideration to be taken into account in terms of who can get permits. A person who owns a Great Barrier Island mussel farm but is from Auckland is equal to a mussel farmer who lives on Great Barrier Island itself. 17 This policy has created great internal conflict among locals. Some locals would have been willing to support an increase in mussel farm permits if these could be maintained by locals. Policy, however, does not allow for such local accountability or recognition of interest. The same applies to tourism-related concession contracts with the Department of Conservation. No guaranteed benefits to the local community are ensured.

BREAKING CONCEPTUAL BOUNDARIES If social-local-economic-ecological boundaries are in reality intertwined and exhibit multiple connections rather than being clearly separable, what is left out by building policies that act otherwise? If an aspect of nature or

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society is not known or recognized by way of policy, its existence is not recognized. Bounding individualized commercial interests leaves out ecosystems as a whole, including noncommercial aspects of nature, as well as the relational aspect of society. Because of the way nature and society has been divided in policy in New Zealand, the only answer to the problem of the nature-culture relationship problem is strict bounding through preservation. This is the only way to keep nature as a whole. Yet, by doing so, humans and “the local” are once again left out of nature. In order to overcome the conceptual and policy boundaries built under policy regimes such as those of New Zealand, knowledge creation must include the processes of objective science placed in dialogue with local knowledge. Our objective science demands the universality of distance and objectivity, but we also need local knowledge—contextualization—to form effective policy that is built on a more nuanced view of the integration of society and nature.18 The conservation community is largely made up of professionals trained in such a way as to give priority to scientific explanations and strategies for protecting biodiversity. However, science arises out of a particular intellectual and philosophical tradition and often discredits other ways of knowing, creating a barrier to dialogue with local communities and the possibility for finding a common language and goals. For example, on Great Barrier Island, local people continually said of the DOC and their scientific studies: “They never ask us! I’ve sat here every day for forty years observing the estuary and the brown teal ducks and ecologists come in and do a one month study, demand I change some type of activity, without ever asking me what I’ve observed, and then leave.” So why is this local knowledge needed alongside the more distance objective knowledge? Contextualized science and policy are part of the bridge between nature and society that allows deeper levels of existence and caring to develop. Care theorist, Nel Noddings, calls for the movement between the abstract and the concrete. She says that one of the greatest dangers may be premature switching to a rational-objective mode. If rational-objective thinking is to be put in the service of caring for nature and the human community, we must at the right moments turn it away from the abstract toward which it tends and back to the concrete. The rational-objective mode must continually be reestablished and redirected from a fresh base of the concrete. Otherwise, we become deeply enmeshed in procedures that somehow serve only themselves; our thoughts are separated, completely detached, from the original context.19 To move back and forth allows the practice of living our lives within society and nature to become craft over against abstract reasoning alone.20 Great Barrier Island is an example of a case where local knowledge and involvement might provide the link between the theory of protecting nature

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and its practice. As with the proposed marine reserve, consensus at the local level is the only means of policing the reserve. No other way exists of protecting an area extending out eighteen kilometers (twelve miles) from the coastline from poaching at night. A constant criticism of the Great Barrier Island marine reserve proposal is the problem of policing the reserve. The Department of Conservation wants to establish the reserve only on its scientific merits, as delineated in the original legislation without presenting as part of the package the contextual plan on policing and ensuring benefits to the local community. This lack of contextualization remains the largest barrier to locals. The reality of integration of society and nature means that the protection of biodiversity can only take place through the vehicle of human institutions such as laws, organizations, or cultural practices.21 Our objective science demands the universality of distance and objectivity. In reality, we can benefit from seeing nature, human nature, and our understanding of knowledge intertwined.22

RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY AND THEOLOGY If we view nature as intertwined with human society in a thickly nuanced, intricately interactive reality, we move to a relational, rather than an individualistic understanding of ethical agency, and ground our ethical systems in an embodied form.23 In this relational ontology, humans are viewed “not as an individually held static quality of mind but as a relational achievement that is constituted between others-in-relation.”24 Several theoretical movements are simultaneously arguing for this very thing. Care theorists, arising out of feminist ethics, work out of a relational framework.25 Likewise, Sarah Whatmore uses the concept of hybridity to describe this reality as a “mode of worldly inhabitation that precedes the urge to separate out the social from the natural” and a “gesture toward their reconciliation.”26 What it is to be human cannot be conceived apart from these relationships. The same can be said of nature. Theologian Douglas Hall argues that while traditional theological reflection has centered on traits possessed by humans that image God, a minority tradition has identified the image of God not as a quality of being but as a quality of relationship. Hall proposes a biblical ontology of communion, community, and ecology similar to that of Joseph Sittler.27 Hall states, “we are created for relationship. Relatedness—and specifically the modality of relatedness designated by the biblical word ‘love’—is the essence of our humanity as the Creator-Redeemer of this tradition intends it.”28 In this relatedness, nature is not a neutral backdrop, but rather God, humanity, and nature are inextricably bound up with one another.29 To start from the

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assumption that humans are interdependent means that the terms for our moral discussions must shift. Local community health and wholeness is one measure of the fulfillment of that relational aspect of human nature as well as in the relationship between humans and land.30 Hall is part of a group of so-called social Trinitarians, namely, those that argue that God is who God is only by virtue of the relationships among the persons of the godhead—God is a community of Love, a family of interpenetrating perichoretic Love. Thus, a relational ontology arising out of secular streams of thought is backed by a relational theology. Colin Gunton goes so far as to say that whereas Descartes and his successors destroyed the understanding of the symbiosis of social and universal order, “we shall not understand our place in the world unless we face up to the way in which we are internally related to the rest of the world.”31 Not only is it wrong to abstract humans from their social context, Gunton argues that abstracting the environment from its inhabitants leads to a world that is emptied of its personal meaning.32 Can there be a rebuilding on the new theological foundation suggested by the Trinitarians?33 The key to Gunton is an appreciation for the role of the spirit in which the spirit is to do the crossing of boundaries while maintaining and even strengthening particularity. “It is not a spirit of merging or assimilation—of homogenization—but of relation in otherness, relation which does not subvert but established the other in its true reality.”34 In contrast, the modern notion of particularity loses that particular when it is deprived of its concrete subsistence and meaning.35 Growing Trinitarian dialogue promises to reshape the way we see our relations to God, to the earth, and to each other. It also reveals a deep human desire to be connected to each other and to the earth.36 All entities are what they are only by virtue of their relationships to other entities, having their source in the God who is a community of Love, a family of interpenetrating perichoretic Love. In Christian terms, all being is being-with; all existence is coexistence, because the God who makes and sustains all things is a triune community of mutually engendering and indwelling love.37 The challenge is to build natural resource policies that invite this communion, extending it to the rest of creation.38 Therefore, what does theology have to teach about fisheries management? A relational ontology and theology make it possible to develop a view of boundaries among people, among societal groups, and among humans and nature as places for relationship building rather than as tools to demarcate differences. A relational ontology suggests that rather than looking at boundaries as something that divide, they should be seen as opportunities for dialogue and relationship building that deepens understanding of ourselves, our place in the world, and our relationship to nature.39 Then

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it follows that “knowing” also is only possible through understanding relationships, whether it is the relationship among entities, or between creations and the Creator. New Zealand’s marine management strategies favor a universalized policy regime with equitable treatment of each individual, individuals who are assumed to have no basis for continuing relationships with each other.40 The alternative, relational model must be built on more flexibility and assume ongoing relationships within the human community as well as between the human community and environment. The reality of ecological systems is that their long-term stability requires models that integrate nonlinearity, complexity, flexibility, quick feedback, and change.41 In the former, the public becomes an abstract concept, one more element to add to a technical question, allowing the expert to remain above the fray.42 The relational model requires natural resource agencies to make clearer distinctions, acknowledging its on-the-ground reality.43 Community management strategies of a variety of types have been initiated in the management of fisheries.44 Environment Canada has replaced its basic management model with a more flexible approach in its development of its Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP). The program stresses community involvement in dealing with coastal problems.45 Community involvement goes beyond participation to what are referred to as communitybased initiatives.46 The role of Environment Canada has changed to allow for local ownership of decision-making and actions. In the case of the ACAP, environmental monitoring activities are often done by unpaid volunteers because government funding is not sufficient.47 Yet, government agencies still need to empower the local community, support their initiatives, and provide some funding.48 The relationships across scales are important. Common characteristics underlie the success of these initiatives. Local stakeholders and the government must mutually recognize the existence of the resource problems, and this mutual recognition serves to initiate a joint management arrangement. Local interests and knowledge must be recognized. Local institutional capacity must exist or be built. User rights must be clearly defined, and enforcement must be effective through the provision of legal and policy support. The objects of the management scheme must be clear and agreed upon by both local and government interests with tangible mutually agreed upon results. In the end, the combination of these characteristics leads to positive attitudes toward rules and toward collective action rather than their being undermined.49 A relational ontology, undergirded by a relational theology lead to a fundamental need for building trust as a fundamental building block for any management scheme. Trust is achieved through verification, and verification is achieved through monitoring, not just of biodiversity but of

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ecological, biological, social, and economic conditions. Such monitoring is embedded in local community initiatives because it is essential for building trust, for discussion, and for knowing if actions have led to desired objectives.50 Trust building is a process, not an outcome, just as monitoring is a continuous process.51

NATURE-SOCIETY REENVISIONED The picture of nature inherent in, and established by, the QMS has changed social relations on Great Barrier Island. The Individual Quota System has split nature into pieces of a bundle of property rights. These property rights have been distributed in such a way as to transform social relations between people and the nonhuman world and relations among people. The countermove has been to create more protected areas. Science has been a part of this process of division, tending to fragment both biological and human systems into parts in the application of management policies and then left science, policy, and the market as the means for reconnecting the pieces of nature into a whole and reconnecting this whole with human society.52 We are in need of a Trinitarian imagination and a relational ontology in constructing our future on this earth. Nature and culture are not separate, objective entities. Neither are they social constructions. “They are sociomaterial fabrication in which the histories and geographies” are made flesh.53 We need to continue to develop a more integrative understanding of the relationships among God, humans and societal structure, and the earth, one that is more complete and nuanced than we presently have. Such a model must move beyond traditional concepts of human stewardship of creation to embeddedness in social structure and the earth and beyond the human-nature dualism that dominates present natural resource policy. Such an understanding must be built on the reality of the profoundly relational nature of not just human relations but also in the relationship between humans and the earth. This relational understanding must draw as well on the insights of modern ecology in contrast to various forms of scientific reductionism. This relational understanding of science goes beyond the traditional model of rationality that assumes that more information on a phenomenon automatically leads to answers on what actions to take in the management of the creation, free of the formative influence of the human community and thus failing to include sufficient legitimacy to communities and social structure. The universalizing nature of science has abstracted nature, humans, and their interrelationships from our more thickly nuanced, intricately interactive reality.

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A faith-informed ontology is not built on a dualistic and oppositional structure of culture and nature. Rather culture and nature are viewed as inherently relational and representing a whole that in turn has its origins in, and is sustained by, God. The challenge is to build policies that recognize this reality.

NOTES 1. For more extensive treatments of this topic, see Janel Curry, “Globalization and the Problem of the Nature/Culture Boundary,” in Secularity and Globalization: What Comes After Modernity? ed. James K. A. Smith (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, forthcoming); Janel M. Curry, “The Nature-Culture Boundary and Oceans’ Policy: Great Barrier Island, New Zealand,” The Geographical Review 97 (2007): 46–66. 2. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155, no. 376 (1967): 1203–7. 3. R. Clough, “Introduction,” in Great Barrier Island, ed. D. Armitage (Christchurch, N.Z.: Canterbury University Press, 2001), 10–20, 19. 4. Janel M. Curry, “Contested Ocean Spaces: Great Barrier Island, New Zealand,” Focus 48 (2006): 25–30. 5. B. M. H. Sharp, “From Regulated Access to Transferable Harvesting Rights: Policy Insights from New Zealand,” Marine Policy 21, no. 6 (1997): 501–17; C. J. Batstone and B. M. H. Sharp, “New Zealand’s Quota Management System: The First Ten Years,” Marine Policy 23, no. 2 (1999): 177–90. 6. P. A. Memon and R. Cullen, “Fisheries Policies and Their Impact on the New Zealand Maori,” Marine Resource Economics 7 (1992): 158. 7. Auckland City, Great Barrier Island (GBI) Overview and Strategy, Report to Directors (February 24, 2003), 5; L. Howie and A. Robertson, “Great Barrier Island Community Profile,” (unpublished manuscript, 2002), 12. 8. B. Mansfield, “Rules of Privatization: Contradictions in Neoliberal Regulation of North Pacific Fisheries,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (2004): 565–84, 570. 9. Department of Conservation, A Marine Reserve for Great Barrier Island? Your Chance to Have a Say (January, 2003), 4. 10. J. Fall, “Divide and Rule: Constructing Human Boundaries in ‘Boundless Nature,’” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 243–51. 11. Fall, “Divide and Rule,” 246. 12. C. A. Capitini, B. N. Tissot, M. S. Carroll, W. J. Walsh, and S. Peck, “Competing Perspectives in Resource Protection: The Case of Marine Protected Areas in West Hawaii,” Society and Natural Resources 17 (2004): 776. 13. Fall, “Divide and Rule,” 248. 14. G. A. Bradshaw and M. Bekoff, “Integrating Humans and Nature,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 15, no. 8 (2000): 309. 15. Mansfield, “Rules of Privatization,” 566. 16. Clough, “Introduction,” 19.

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17. P. Simons, “Going Beyond Technicism and Neo-liberal Economism: What Is Involved in a Sustainable Long-term Care of Land and Sea?” (Paper presented at Hui on “Caring for Land and Sea,” Tamihana Foundation, June 12, 2004), 1. 18. Bradshaw and Bekoff, “Integrating Humans,” 309. 19. N. Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 26. 20. S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Sage Press, 2002), 3. 21. S. R. Brechin, P. R. Wilshusen, C. L. Fortwangler, and P. C. West, “Beyond the Square Wheel: Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Biodiversity Conservation as Social and Political Process,” Society and Natural Resources 15 (2002): 46. 22. J. M. Curry-Roper, “Embeddedness in Place: Its Role in the Sustainability of a Rural Farm Community in Iowa,” Space and Culture 4, no. 5 (2000): 204–22. 23. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 146. 24. B. Stephenson, “Nature, Technology and the Imago Dei: Mediating the Nonhuman through the Practice of Science,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 57 (2005): 7. 25. R. E. Groenhout, Theological Echoes in an Ethic of Care, Erasmus Institute Occasional Papers 2003–2 (South Bend, Ind.: Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, 2003). 26. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 98. 27. D. J. Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 124; J. Sittler, Evocations of Grace: Writings on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics, ed. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter Bakken (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000). 28. Hall, Imaging God, 113. 29. Hall, Imaging God, 129. 30. D. J. Hall, “The Spirituality of the Covenant: Imaging God, Stewarding Earth,” Perspectives (December 1988): 11–14. 31. C. E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15. 32. Gunton, The One, 16. 33. Gunton, The One, 155. 34. Gunton, The One, 181, 182. 35. Gunton, The One, 193. 36. J. Wood, J. Curry, M. Bjelland, S. Bouma-Prediger, and S. Bratton, “Christian Environmentalism: Cosmos, Community, and Place,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 57, no. 1 (2005): 2. 37. Wood et al., “Christian Environmentalism,” 5. 38. Wood et al., “Christian Environmentalism,” 5. 39. J. M. Curry and S. McGuire, Community on Land: Community, Ecology, and the Public Interest (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 209–34. 40. J. F. Handler, Law and the Search for Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 40. 41. James W. Crossley, “Managing Ecosystems for Integrity: Theoretical Considerations for Resource and Environmental Managers,” Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 465.

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42. B. J. McCay and S. Jentoft, “From the Bottom Up: Participatory Issues in Fisheries Management,” Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 243. 43. Nancy J. Manring, “Alternative Dispute Resolution and Organizational Incentives in the U.S. Forest Service,” Society and Natural Resources 11 (1998): 67–80, 75. 44. Anthony Davis and Conner Bailey, “Common in Custom, Uncommon in Advantage: Common Property, Local Elites, and Alternative Approaches to Fisheries Management,” Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 255. 45. G. M. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Management in Atlantic Canada” (Paper presented at the International Rural Geography Symposium, St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1999), 1. 46. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Management,” 3. 47. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Management,” 3. 48. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Management,” 5. 49. B. Katon, R. S. Pomeroy, L. R. Garces, and A. M. Salamanca, “Fisheries Management of San Salvador Island, Philippines: A Shared Responsibility,” Society and Natural Resources 12 (1999): 777–95, 792–93. 50. G. Gray and J. Kusel, “Changing the Rules,” American Forests 103, no. 4 (1998): 27–30, 29–30. 51. Michael P. Dombeck, Christopher A. Wood, and Jack E. Williams, “Focus: Restoring Watersheds, Rebuilding Communities,” American Forests 103, no. 4 (1998): 26. 52. Bradshaw and Bekoff, “Integrating Humans,” 309. 53. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 98.

Index

ACAP. See Atlantic Coastal Action Program Adeyemo, Tokundoh, 108 AFDC. See Aid to Families with Dependent Children Africa, 6, 37, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110; Africa, A Continent Self-Destructs (Schwab), 99; Continent in Chaos (Ayittey), 99; sub-Sahara Africa, 99, 100, 106 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144 aliens, 65, 73, 74 Anselm. See Saint Anselm of Canterbury Appleby, Joyce, 93 Aquinas, Thomas, 42, 45, 46, 47, 54 ARC. See Auckland Regional Council Areopagitica, 101 Aristotle, 34, 35, 39 Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP), 160 Auckland Regional Council (ARC), 156 Augustine, 23, 24, 34, 124 Ayittey, George, 99

Bacon, Francis, 64, 75 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 4, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Bear Flag revolt, 87, 89, 90 beliefs: American values and, 82; associated with ethnic hatred, 108; perceptual, 40; shaping societal and worldview, 152 Bellah, Robert, 82, 83 Benton, Senator Thomas Hart, 88 biodiversity, 155, 157, 158, 161 birthing, 115; Who’s Having This Baby? Perspectives on Birthing (Buzzanell, Turner), 128 boundaries, 3, 5, 22, 65, 101, 103, 152, 153, 156, 159; breaking conceptual boundaries, 156; conceptual and policy, 157; fisheries, marine reserves, and, 154; lack of, 6; methodological naturalist, 65; nature-culture, 151, 154; prestipulated conceptual-theoretical, 5, 65; religious, 116; social, 154; social-local-economic-ecological, 156; standard employment, 154 165

166

Index

Boyle, Robert, 57, 63, 71, 75 bracketing the referent(s), 15, 18, 19 Brauer, Matthew, 67 Bridgewater Treatises, 57, 64; From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Keller), 124 Brumbaugh, Daniel, 67 bubble universe, 74 Buchanan, James, 88 Bujo, Benezet, 107 Buning, Sietze. See Wiersma, Stanley California, 6, 47, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97; University of, 84 California, From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (Royce), 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 96 Californians: Anglo and Mexican, 91; native, 87, 90, 92, 96 Californios, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92 Calvin, John, 40 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 120 capitalism, 108, 109, 131 carelessness, 86 care theory, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129 Carroll, Lewis, 13 Carter, Stephen, 102, 111 Casey, James, 92 charitable choice legislation, 140 Child Care Tax Credit, 141 Chomsky, Noam, 16 Christian, 2, 33, 118, 122, 123, 128, 159; academics, 1; community, 3; faith, 108; feminist and Christian worldview, 117; JudeoChristian tradition, 95; message, 3; nationalism, 118; scholarship, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 117; social reformers, 145; theological tradition, 127; traditions, 3; triumphalism, 7; voices, 118; Western European intellectual context, 61; worldview, 118

Christianity, 35, 36, 40, 118; in Africa, 105; The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity (Maguire), 118 The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Blamires), 2 Christians, 3, 118, 128; freedom of opportunity for, 134; fundamentalist voices, 118 Christians, Clifford, 105 circulating words, 21 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 134 Clendenning, John, 86 clockwork universe, 46, 47 Commission on Freedom of the Press (Hutchins), 103 communicating, 18, 19, 100 communication, 100, 102, 120, 122, 124, 132; action and, 117; community and, 109; ethic based on power, 124; policymaking communication ethic of care, 124; positive, 121; power function of, 123; styles and structures of, 121; theory, 100, 104; theory and media freedom, 104 communist-socialist theory, 104 communitarian social behavior, 100 communitarian theory, 104, 107 community, 7, 37, 40, 84, 92, 95, 96, 106, 107, 109, 110, 123, 127, 128, 132, 141, 142, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161; academic, 3; Anglo-American, 91; California and the, 85; called to be a member of a, 2; communication and, 105; faith, 1, 3; global, 104; individualism and, 82; irreducible community of two, 4, 21, 24, 27; linguistic, 15; memory and hope of, 82; moral obligation to, 38; nature of persons and society in, 85; norms, 6; norms or social values, 103; as source of authority of morality, 39 Concerned Women for America, 119 confession, 6, 81, 82, 96, 122, 123 Congo, 107 connectedness, 6, 110; human, 8, 105

Index connective, 7, 124 Continent in Chaos. See Africa: Continent in Chaos (Ayittey) correspondence view of truth, 26 cosmological anthropic principles, 57, 69 Cours de linguistique générale (The Course in General Linguistics) (de Saussure), 14 creationism, 64, 68 Crick, Francis, 73 Cronon, William, 93 Culler, Jonathan Culler, 14 cultural contract, 109 cultural institutions, 119 Curry, Janel M., 1, 8, 123, 151 Danforth, John, 118 Darwin, 62, 69 Darwinian evolutionary theory, 58 Davies, Paul, 46, 61, 71 Dawkins, Richard, 58, 67, 71 de Laplace, Pierre Simon, 47 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 19, 20, 28 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 14 Descartes, 159 design. See intelligent design design-phobic ideas, 69 design-tropic ideas, 69; in nature, 57; standard theories, 59; supernatural, 60, 64; theories, 63, 71 determinism, 47, 49, 50, 54 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 82 dialogic, 23, 24, 27 dialogism, 22 différance, 19; In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 124 Dillard, Annie, 20 discourse, 17, 19; authoritative, 23, 24; faith and learning, 166; historical, 93; interpretive, 25; moral, 85; persuasive, 23, 24; public, 82, 108; scientific, 14; symbolic, 103 dissenters, 102 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 133 Eck, Diane, 118

167

economic liberalism, 154 ecosystems, 151, 157 EITC. See Earned Income Tax Credit Eldredge, Niles, 68 Ellul, Jacque, 108 embedded in prepositions, 20 empirical, 8, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 84, 105; data, 5, 58, 63, 67, 68; default position, 67; disconnect between the supernatural and the, 60; evidence, 67; investigation, 73, 74; investigations of social policy issues, 166; predictions, 63 Environment Canada, 160 epistemological confusion, 25, 103; earnings-disregards, 138 Etulain, Richard, 95 Fackler, Mark, 3, 6, 99 Faith and Politics (Danforth), 118 Family Support Act of 1988, 137 Faraday, Michael, 57 Felch, Susan M., 4, 13 Feminist Power Analysis, 120 Feynman, Richard, 52 fluid gendered responses, 117 Food Stamp (FS) Program, 133, 134, 135, 141 food stamps, 136 forty-niner, 84 Foss, Sonja, 118, 123 fourfold theory of causation, 50 Four Theories of the Press, 102, 103 free speech, 101, 102 French Encyclopedists, 53 FS. See Food Stamp Program full integration of humans, society, and nature, 151 Futuyma, Douglas, 68 Gabriel, Ralph Henry, 84 gap picture, 35, 36 gender construction, 119 gender partnership, 6, 128 Ghana, 101, 105, 107 Gilligan, Carol, 124

168

Index

Goldberg, Michelle, 117 golden rule, 32 Gold Rush, 85, 91, 95 good Samaritan, 39 Good Work When Excellence and Ethics Meet, 109 Gray, John, 127 Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, 8, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 Great Society program, 134, 136 Griffin, Cindy, 118, 123 Groenhout, Ruth, 124 guilt, 38, 91, 122 Gunton, Colin, 8, 159 Guthrie, Woody, 94

individual property rights, 151 Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ), 153 intelligent design, 5, 57, 58, 64, 73 Intelligent Design Movement (IDM), 57, 58 interchange, 25 invitational rhetoric, 7, 118 irreducible community of two, 22 ITQ. See Individual Transferable Quota

Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 82 Hall, Douglas, 8, 158 Hardy, Lee, 27 Hare, John, 4, 31 Harrison, Edward, 71, 73 Heidegger, Martin, 14 Herschel, John, 57 heteroglossia, 21 Hine, Robert V., 95 The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis (White), 151 Hocking, William Ernest, 103 Hoyle, Fred, 69, 70, 73 human connectedness. See connectedness: human humanist manifesto, 37 humanity, impoverished view of, 121 humanly constructed society, 8 Hunt, Lynn, 93 Hutchins, Robert. See Commission on Freedom of the Press Huxley, Thomas, 65 hybridity, 158

Kant, Immanuel, 31, 34, 35, 38, 41 KANU, 107 Kenya, 100, 101, 102, 107 Kenyatta, Jomo, 101 Kepler, Johannes, 57, 60 Kikuyu, 101 kinetic, 49, 50 Kingdom Coming (Goldberg), 117 Kuhn, Thomas S., 14

Ide, William B., 90 IDM. See Intelligent Design Movement Iliffe, John, 100 image of God, 1, 6, 151, 158 income-transfer programs, 132 Individualized Quota, 153

Jacob, Margaret, 93 James, William, 83, 84 James King of William (Casey), 92 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 85 Jones, William Carey, 87

Lagrange, 54 Land Act of 1851, 92 language, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 101, 103, 106, 123, 141, 157; flexibility of, 22; to God, 4, 18, 24, 25, 26, 28; linear system, 22; literature and, 22; nature of, 15, 27; structure of, 15; two kinds of, 23; view of, 4, 25, 27 langue, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 27 Larkin, Thomas, 88, 90 Lasn, Kalle, 109 law, 32, 33, 38, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55, 102, 108, 116, 145, 146 Law of Universal Gravitation, 47 Legacy of Conquest (Limerick), 82, 83, 85, 90, 94 Lenoir, Timothy, 61 Lerner, Gerda, 125

Index Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 14 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 16 Lewontin, Richard, 68, 73 Lilburne, John, 102 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 82, 83, 85, 90, 93, 94, 95 Linde, Andrei, 73, 74, 75 linguistics, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20; community, 15; competency of, 16; moral coherence and, 4; reductionistic tendencies of, 4; Saussurean, 16, 20. See also Cours de linguistique générale Loop Theorem, 49 lost continent, 99 loyalty, 39, 85, 96, 110 Lucie-Smith, Alexander, 105 macroevolution, 67 Magesa, Laurent, 105 Maguire, Daniel, 118 mandatory employment programs, 138 manifest destiny, 86, 90 Maori, 152, 154 Marine Reserves law, 154 Marsden, George M., 2 Marx, Karl, 37 mass media, 100, 101 Maxwell, James, 57 McLuhan, Marshall, 108 McMullin, Ernan, 71, 72 McMurtry, Larry, 93, 94, 95, 96 The Mechanical Bride (Marshall), 108 mechanical picture of the universe, 4 mechanical views, 5 mechanistic, 53, 72 Medicaid, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140 Medicare, 133 medicine, 116 metaphysical, 25, 53, 68, 75 Mexican War, 87, 90 microevolution, 67 Milner, Clyde, 93 Milton, John, 101, 102 The Mind of God (Davies), 46 minimum wage, 140

169

Minnesota MFIP program, 144 modes of explanation, 48; mechanistic, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55; variational, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 monarchial authoritarian theory, 104 The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity (Maguire), 118 A Moral Creed for All Christians (Maguire), 118 moral demand, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40 moral gap, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37 morality, 4, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 105, 124, 152; authority of, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Mouw, Richard J., 2, 3, 6, 8 Moyo, Ambrose, 105 Murdoch, Iris, 61 Murphy, Nancey, 60 Napoleon, 47 nation building, 100 natural capacities, 31, 34, 35, 37, 39 natural contract, 109 naturalism, 5, 58, 66, 68, 72, 73; biology and, 67; human nature, 131, 158, 159, 161; metaphysical, 58; methodological, 5, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75; methodological naturalism and cosmology, 69; nature, 39, 57, 154, 155; philosophical, 59, 67, 69, 71. See also boundaries natural law, 42 natural resource management, 151, 152 nature-culture, 151, 154, 155, 157, 161, 162; of God, 54; nonmechanistic views, 52; nurture or, 119, 127; society and, 153, 154; uniformity of, 62 neoliberal: economics, 8 neoliberalism, 156 Nevel circle, 16 Newton, Sir Isaac, 46, 47, 54, 57, 60 Newtonian, 47, 48, 53 Newtonianism, 46; Three Laws of Motion, 47

170 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 103 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38 Nigerian, 101, 104 Nkrumah, Kwame, 101 Noddings, Nel, 123, 157 Noll, Mark, 2 nonmechanical view, 4, 5, 45 nonnatural truths, 66 nonpredictiveness, 62 normative relativism, 39 nurture, 120, 128; nature or, 119, 127 Oak, Henry, 88, 89 Occam’s Razor, 71 Ochieng, Philip, 107 Ogbonnaya, 104, 106 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, 134 Ong, Walter, 100 opposition, 19, 58, 88, 117, 127; binary, 20; gender, 119, 121, 127 oppositions: binary, 28 oral culture, 100 original sin, 34 Paley, William, 64, 72. See also Bridgewater Treatises parole, 15, 16, 17, 19 particularity, 159 patriarchy, 119 Pennock, Robert, 64, 68 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 140, 141, 142 perspectivalists, 25 perspectival realism, 4, 25, 26 philosophy of science, 5, 52, 54, 58 Planck, Max, 52, 61 planned socialism, 131 Plato, 34, 39 pluralism, 104, 118 pluralist thinkers, 118 Polanyi, Michael, 14 policy regimes, 157 political dissidents, 111 politics, 81, 88, 101, 115, 116, 119, 120

Index Politics of Past Evil Religion, Reconciliation and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Philpott), 81 Polk Administration, 88 postmodernity, 104, 117 potential energy, 49, 50 poverty programs, 136, 140, 142 poverty rates, 135, 136; among ethnic minorities, 143 pragmatic, 59, 64, 75 prescientific, 45, 46 principle of least action, 50, 53, 61 principle of least time, 48 Promise Keepers, 119 PRWORA. See Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act public intellectual space, 7, 117 Puritan dissidents, 102 QMS. See Quota Management System Quota Management System (QMS), 153, 154 racial-ethnic relations, 87 Rainbow Coalition, 107 Ratzsch, Del, 5, 6, 57 reciting, 23, 24 relational ontology, 158, 159, 160, 161 relational theology, 159, 160 representational epistemology, 26 Republic (Socrates), 33 Republican Party in 1856, 82 rights-based management, 153 Robinson, Forrest G., 94 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 Royce, Josiah, 6, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96 Royce, Sarah Bayliss, 84 Ruddick, Sara, 123 Ruse, Michael, 59, 68 Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 34 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Noll), 2 Schaefer, Kurt C., 7, 131, 146

Index Schlissel, Linda, 93 Schwab, Peter. See Africa Schwehn, Mark, 1 scientific emptiness, 60 scientism, 53 Scott, Eugenie, 58, 59, 60 Scotus, John Duns, 34, 39 Scudder, Horrace, 83, 85, 88 Second Great Awakening, 145 Section 8, 133 secular triumphalism, 7 self-correction, 67 Semple, Robert, 90 senses of self, 124 separative, 124 shalom, 6, 151 Shinn, Millicent, 85 The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Turner), 82, 93 signifieds, 15, 19, 24, 27 signifiers, 15, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28 sin, 95, 96, 128 Sittler, Joseph, 158 Sloat, John, 91 Snel’s Law, 48 social arrogance, 86 social contract, 109 social protection, 154 social responsibility theory, 103 social salvation, 92, 96 Social Security, 133 social Trinitarians, 159 Socrates, 33, 38, 84 soluable, 124 SSI. See Supplemental Security Income Starr, Kevin, 83, 84, 95, 96 status quo, reification of the, 121 Sterk, Helen M., 3, 6, 7, 115 Summa of Thomas Aquinas, 45 Supplemental Security Income (SSI), 132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141 Swinburne, Richard, 71 TAC. See Total Allowable Catch TANF. See Temporary Assistance for Needy Families technological prowess, 103

171

Telling the Truth about History (Appleby), 93 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 140, 141, 142, 143 testifying, 23, 24 Theories of the Press. See Four Theories of the Press Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 13 Title IX, 115, 116 Total Allowable Catch (TAC), 153 Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin), 16 traditional theism, 31 transformational grammar, 16 Trinitarians. See social Trinitarians Trinity, 6, 7, 105, 132 triumphalism, 3, 6, 7, 118; Christian, 7; secular, 7 Tronto, Joan, 123 trust-building, 161 truth, correspondence view of, 26 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 82, 83, 93 “two truth” position, 68 Ubuntu, 105, 106 underdetermination of theory by experiment, 51 UNESCO, 108 unfalsifiability, 62 universalized policy regime, 160 Van Baak, David A., 3, 4, 6, 45 variational methods, 52, 54 wage gap, 116 waiver experiments, 138 welfare policy, 7, 134, 135 welfare reform, 131, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Wells, Ronald A., 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96 Whatmore, Sarah, 158 Whewell, William, 57, 72 White, Lynn, 151 White, Richard, 93 Wiersma, Stanley (pseud. Sietze Buning), 122

172

Index

Wiredu, Kwasi, 105, 106, 107 Wood, Julia, 123 Woodward, C. Vann, 94 worldview thinking, 118; African, 105; gender, 117, 120; gender opposition, 119; hegemonic worldview of the

West, 3; mechanistic, 5; scientific, 5; societal beliefs and, 152; theological, 61; values and goals, 119 Worster, Donald, 93, 94 worthy of study: limit what can be considered, 121

About the Contributors

Janel M. Curry is dean for research and scholarship and professor of geography at Calvin College. Her published work, which has appeared in major disciplinary journals, has centered on worldview and natural resource management. Her most recent book is Community on Land: Community, Ecology, and the Public Interest (with Steven McGuire). Mark Fackler, professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College, has published widely in professional ethics. His works include Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, Good News: Social Ethics and the Press, and Ethics and Evil in the Public Sphere. He has lectured in Mongolia, Guatemala, and Norway, but most frequently in East Africa, where he also does development work in cooperation with students from both continents. Susan M. Felch is professor of English at Calvin College and past director of the Seminars in Christian Scholarship. Her research interests are in sixteenth-century British literature as well as in theoretical approaches to religion and literature. Her publications include a series of volumes on the spiritual biographies of the seasons (coedited with Gary Schmidt), Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (coedited with Paul J. Contino), The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, and the forthcoming Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers. John Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. Before going to Yale in 2003 he taught at Calvin College for fourteen years. His recent books include God and Morality: A Philosophical History, Why Bother Being Good, and God’s Call. 173

174

About the Contributors

Del Ratzsch is chair and professor of philosophy at Calvin College. He specializes in philosophy of science, with particular focus on science/religion integration questions. His published work deals with a variety of issues in that broad area and includes Science and Its Limits, The Battle of Beginnings, and Nature, Design, and Science. Kurt C. Schaefer, professor of economics at Calvin College, has also directed the college’s Center for Social Research. He is managing editor of Faith and Economics, and secretary/treasurer of the Association of Christian Economists. Much of his published work consists of empirical investigations of social policy issues, including workplace discrimination, income support’s relationship to unmarried parenting, and international trade issues. Helen Sterk is chair and professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College. She held the William Spoelhof Teacher Scholar Chair at Calvin from 1997–1999. Her research interests focus on rhetoric by and about women, including analyses of popular culture, religion, and health discourses. Publications include Gender and Applied Communication (coedited with Patrice Buzzanell and Lynn Turner) and Who’s Having This Baby? Perspectives on Birthing, as well as Differences That Make a Difference (edited with Lynn Turner) and Constructing and Reconstructing Gender (edited with Linda A. M. Perry and Lynn Turner). Sterk has served as editor of the Journal of Communication and Religion and serves on three other editorial boards. David A. Van Baak, professor of physics at Calvin College, has taught there since 1980. He has spent sabbaticals at Notre Dame and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and a year as Fulbright Lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland. Since 2004 he has also been a collaborating physicist at TeachSpin, Inc., a developer of apparatus for advanced laboratory instruction in physics. Ronald A. Wells is professor of history emeritus at Calvin College. He is now retired in Tennessee, where he is director of the Maryville Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His research interests are in historical aspects of peace and justice issues, and in bringing “faith and learning” discourse into professional historical scholarship. He is author of History through the Eyes of Faith and History and the Christian Historian. He was editor of Fides et Historia for fourteen years.