The Burden of the Humanities

Wilfred M. McClay, Univ. of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2008
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Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear.

Enter the eminent literary scholar Stanley Fish, author of a regular blog for The New York Times, who addressed the subject with a kicky piece entitled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (Jan. 6, 2008). Where there is Fish there will always be bait, for nothing pleases this contrarian professor more than ­double-­crossing his readers’ expectations and enticing them into a heated debate, and he did not ­disappoint.

He took as his starting point Anthony Kronman’s passionate and ­high-­minded book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), in which Kronman argues that higher education has lost its soul, and can only recover it by re-emphasizing the building of character through the study of great literary and philosophical texts. Fish was having none of such “pretty ideas.” There is “no evidence,” he sniffed, that such study has the effect of “ennobling” us or spurring us on to noble actions. If it did, then the finest people on earth would be humanities professors, a contention for which the evidence is, alas, mostly on the other side.

Teachers of literature and philosophy possess specialized knowledge, Fish asserted, but they do not have a ministry. The humanities can’t save us, and in fact they don’t really “do” anything, other than give pleasure to “those who enjoy them.” Those of us involved with the humanities should reconcile ourselves to the futility of it all, and embrace our uselessness as a badge of honor. At least that way we can claim that we are engaged in “an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and mostly negative response from the Times’ online readers. To read through the hundreds of comments is to be reminded that Americans do seem to have a strong and abiding respect for the humanities. For many of these readers, Fish’s remarks failed the test of moral seriousness, and failed to come to terms with exactly what it is that makes the humanities special, and places upon them a particular task, a particular burden, in the life of our civilization. That one of the humanities’ most famous, influential, and ­well-­paid elder statesmen would damn his own livelihood with such faint praise seems in itself a perfect indicator of where we now find ­ourselves.

What does it mean to speak of the “burden” of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the ­near ­opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our ­duty.

Both of these senses of ­burden—­the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as ­task—­need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible.

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities—­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide—­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in—­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

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First, we should try to impart some clarity to the term “humanities.” It is astounding to discover how little attention is given to this task. More often than not, we fall back upon essentially bureaucratic definitions that reflect the ways in which the modern research university parcels out office space. The commonest definition in circulation is a long sentence from a congressional ­statute—­the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. As you might expect, this rendition is wanting in a certain grace. But here it is: “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.”

In some respects, this provides a useful beginning. But doesn’t it tacitly assume that we already understand the thing being defined? Rather than answer the larger question, a long list merely evades it. One doesn’t capture the animating goals of a manufacturing firm merely by listing all of the firm’s discrete activities, from procurement of raw materials to collection of accounts receivable. The task of definition requires that some overarching purpose be taken into ­account.

It is a bad sign that defenders of the humanities become ­tongue-­tied so quickly when a layperson asks what the humanities are, and why we should value them. Sometimes the answers are downright silly. At a meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies two years ago in Philadelphia, the subject was “Reinvigorating the Humanities,” but the discussion was anything but vigorous. Consider this witticism from Don Randel, then the president of the University of Chicago and ­president-­elect of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “When the lights go out and our friends in science haven’t developed a national energy policy, they’ll be out of business. We, with a book of poems and a candle, will still be alive.” Well, we’ll see about that. This is the kind of ­airy-­fairy, self-congratulatory silliness that gives the humanities a bad name. And when Pauline Yu, president of the council, addressed herself to the big, obvious question—Just what will it take to reinvigorate the humanities?—the answer was stupefyingly predictable. What was needed was, in the immortal words of the great American labor leader Samuel Gompers, more: more money, more fundraising attention from university leaders, more support from Congress, more jobs for ­professors.

The fixation on a Gompers agenda suggests that many of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate. Even at Anthony Kronman’s Yale College, which has an unusually strong commitment to the humanities and many stellar humanities departments, the percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has fallen sharply since 1986, from half of all majors to just over a ­third.

The thing most needful is not more money, but a willingness to think back to first principles. What are the humanities, other than disciplines with “humanistic content”? What exactly are the humanities for, other than giving pleasure to people who enjoy playing inconsequential games with words and ­concepts?

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We live in a different age, far less enamored of the machine, if far more dependent upon it. Which raises, in a different way, the question of the humanities’ past and future. Do any of these three previous understandings of the ­humanities—­the human as opposed to the animal, the divine, or the rational-mechanical—­have any meaning in our times? All three still do, and will continue to. Each has derived its power from its willingness to assert, and insist upon, some crucial aspect of what it means to be human, some aspect that the conditions of the day may have threatened to submerge. What we are as humans is, in some respects, best defined by what we are not: not gods, not angels, not devils, not machines, not merely animals (and ordinarily not rats). The humanities, too, have always defined themselves in opposition, and none of the tendencies they have opposed have ceased to exist, even if they are not as dominant as they once were. That is one of the many reasons why great works of the ­past—­from Aristotle to Dante to Shakespeare to ­Dostoevsky—­do not become obsolete, and have shown the power to endure, and to speak to us today, once we develop the ability to hear them. Indeed, one of the repeated themes of Western intellectual history is the revival of the present by the recovery of the past, a principle most brilliantly exemplified by the Italian Renaissance’s ­self-­conscious appropriation of classical ideals, but also illustrated in our own time by the sustained interest in the recovery of classical philosophy as the platform for a penetrating critique of ­modernity.

But there can be little doubt that the principal challenges to humanity’s humanness have always shifted over time. In our own age, the very category of “the human” itself is under attack, as philosophers decry the hierarchical distinction between humans and animals, or humans and nature, and postmodernists of various stripes proclaim the disappearance of the human “subject.” We also are far less clear about what we mean by the word “culture,” and about the standards by which it is judged, including most notably the clear distinction between “high” and “low,” let alone “excellence” and “mediocrity.” Matthew Arnold felt reasonably confident that we could agree upon what constituted “the best” examples of humanistic expression. But we are not so certain that such a category even makes sense ­anymore.

Still, if the past is any guide, what we call “the humanities” will survive and thrive, however we choose to define them. Indeed, it seems likely that they will experience yet another transformation in the years to ­come—­one that will be, as all the transformations of previous eras have been, an assertion, or reassertion, of some essential element in our humanity that is being neglected or debased or misunderstood. Just what form it will take is impossible to say with any certainty. But I think it possible that the transformation may already be taking its bearings from the problems and prospects now opening before us in the realms of biotechnology and medicine. These ­developments—­human cloning, genetic engineering, artificial wombs, ­species ­melding, ­body-­parts manufacture, bionic and pharmacological enhancements, and many ­others—­are not necessarily favorable to our human flourishing; nor are they necessarily threats to it. But they call into question precisely the inherent limitations that have always figured into what it means to be human, and throw open the windows of possibility, in ways both terrifying and ­exciting.

One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save ­us—­if they can recover their ­nerve—­is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, ­mood-­altering drugs, and ­all-­consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”

Huxley understood that there was something nobly incorrigible in the human spirit, a restlessness and conflictedness that is built into the constitution of our humanity, an unease that somehow comes with being what we are, and that could not be stilled by a regime of mere good feeling, or willingly be sacrificed for its sake. But he also teases and taunts us with the possibility that we might be willing to give up on our peculiarly ­betwixt-­and-­between status, and give up on the riddle that every serious thinker since the dawn of human history has tried to understand. Huxley was disturbing, but also prescient, in fearing that in the relentless search for happiness, it is entirely thinkable that human beings might endeavor to alter their very nature, tampering with the last bastion of fate: their genetic constitution. Should that happen, supreme irony of ironies, the search for human happiness would culminate in the end of the human race as we know it. We would have become something else. The subject, man, would have been devoured by its ­object.

This is, of course, not really so different from the ­self-­subverting pattern of the 20th century’s totalitarian ideologies, which sought to produce “happy” societies by abolishing the independence of the individual. Yet the lure of a pleasure-swaddled posthumanity may be the particular form of that temptation to which the Western liberal democracies of the 21st century are especially prone. Hence the thrust of Huxley’s work, to remind us that if we take such a step in our “quest to live as gods” we will be leaving much of our humanity behind. One of those things left behind may, ironically, be happiness itself, since the very possibility of human happiness is inseparable from the struggles and sufferings and displacements experienced by our restless, complex, and incomplete human natures. Our tradition teaches that very lesson in a hundred texts and a thousand ways, for those who have been shown how to see and hear it. It is not a lesson that is readily on offer in our increasingly distracted world. It is the work of the humanities to remind us of it, and of much else that we are ever-more disposed to ­forget.

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The Professions in America Today: Crucial but Fragile

Howard Gardner, Harvard University
Lee S. Shulman, Stanford University

Daedalus / Summer 2005


Whether one sees the professions as a high point of human achievement, or, in George Bernard Shaw’s piquant phrase, as a “conspiracy against the laity,” there is little question that they have played a dominant role in industrial and postindustrial society since the early twentieth century. It is difficult to envision our era without the physicians, lawyers, and accountants to whom we turn for help at crucial times; or the architects and engineers who shape the environments in which we live; or the journalists and educators to whom we look for information, knowledge, and, on occasion, wisdom.


Some forty years ago, in a Dædalus issue devoted entirely to the professions, guest editor Kenneth Lynn declared, “Everywhere in American life, the professions are triumphant.” He went on to comment, “Given this dramatic situation, it is truly extraordinary how little we know about the professions.”


We appear to know much more about the professions now than we did forty years ago; certainly there is no paucity of scholarly and popular literature on specific professions, if less on the professions in the aggregate. But the professions themselves have not remained frozen over that time. Indeed, they have recently been subjected to a whole new set of pressures, from the growing reach of new technologies to the growing importance of making money.


In recent years, the professions have not always had good press. Worried by evidence of incompetence and dishonesty, the general public seems to have lost its uncritical admiration for the pro-fessional. Some in higher education see creeping professionalism as the enemy of liberal learning. Perhaps most dramatically, potent market forces, untempered by forces of equivalent power, have made it increasingly difficult to delineate just how professionals today differ from those nonprofessionals who also have power and resources in the society.


Triumphant on the one hand, under critical scrutiny on the other, the professions stand in need of fresh attention today. In the essays that follow, our authors review the professions in contemporary America–and the very idea of having a vocation or calling. We raise the question of whether the professions will survive in their recognizable form, evolve into quite different entities, or dissolve entirely; and whether the methods that have been developed for educating professionals are adequate to the current intellectual, practical, and ethical demands of these roles.


Generically, professions consist of individuals who are given a certain amount of prestige and autonomy in return for performing for society a set of services in a disinterested way. At midcentury, American sociologists like Bernard Barber, Everett Hughes, Robert Merton, and Talcott Parsons limned the defining characteristics of the professions. Barber, for example, identified four attributes: a high degree of generalized and systematic knowledge; a primary orientation to community interest rather than personal interest; a high degree of self-control of behavior through a code of ethics; and a system of monetary and honorary rewards that symbolize achievements of the work itself. In more recent times, important studies of specific professions have been carried out by Andrew Abbot, Howard Becker, Elliot Freidson, Anthony Kronman, and Paul Starr–just to name a few who have approached the professions from a sociological perspective. These authorities have stressed the role of explicit training regimens, formal licensure, and procedures whereby untrained, incompetent, or unethical individuals can be excluded from practice.


In our view, six commonplaces are characteristic of all professions, properly construed: a commitment to serve in the interests of clients in particular and the welfare of society in general; a body of theory or special knowledge with its own principles of growth and reorganization; a specialized set of professional skills, practices, and performances unique to the profession; the developed capacity to render judgments with integrity under conditions of both technical and ethical uncertainty; an organized approach to learning from experience both individually and collectively and, thus, of growing new knowledge from the contexts of practice; and the development of a professional community responsible for the oversight and monitoring of quality in both practice and professional education.


The primary feature of any profession –the commitment to serve responsibly, selflessly, and wisely–sets the terms of the compact between the profession and the society. The centrality of this commitment defines the inherently ethical relationship between the professional and the general society. It also sets up the essential tension between the two poles of professional responsibility: the duty to serve the interests of one’s immediate client and the obligation one has to the society at large. The lawyer’s dual responsibilities of serving as both an officer of the court and as a zealous advocate for her clients exemplify this tension. Failure to deal responsibly with this tension frequently creates the conditions that we have termed ‘compromised practice.’
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Accommodating Faith in the Military

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Over the past few years, there have been several controversies over religion's role in the military. Most recently, students and staff at the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point have complained of pressure from their supervisors to engage in religious activities. Three years earlier, there were similar allegations at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Other controversies have arisen over whether military chaplains may offer faith-specific prayers at official military events. With cadets, military officers and chaplains asserting competing constitutional rights, these disputes have raised multifaceted and complicated questions. To clarify these issues, the Pew Forum turns to church-state scholar Robert W. Tuttle.

Featuring:
Robert W. Tuttle, David R. and Sherry Kirschner Berz Research Professor of Law and Religion, George Washington University Law School

Interviewer:
Jesse Merriam, Research Associate, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In this Q&A:
Background on the controversies
The chaplaincy paradox
Will there be more litigation in the future?

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Question & Answer

Recently there have been several disputes over religion’s role in the military. Can you give us some background on these controversies?

There is a very long relationship between religion and the military in the United States, going back to the early days of the Army, which had chaplains funded by the Continental Congress. But over the last 30 years, the military, like many other parts of our society, has become much more religiously diverse. This diversity has produced some of the recent controversies.

For example, a few years ago there were complaints that some Air Force Academy faculty members and more-senior cadets were pressuring cadets to participate in religious activities. Those who investigated the complaints expressed concerns about a culture of proselytizing at the academy. There also have been a number of stories of service men and women in various branches of the military being pressured to participate in prayers.

When thinking about these controversies, it’s important to distinguish between mandatory and voluntary religious activities. All service academies used to require everyone to attend religious services. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found this requirement unconstitutional in Anderson v. Laird (1972), the Naval Academy still holds pre-meal prayers, and attendance at these meals is required. This has recently stirred up some controversy, leading some students at the Naval Academy to seek legal help from the American Civil Liberties Union. A similar practice of mealtime prayer at the Virginia Military Institute was held unconstitutional by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mellen v. Bunting (2003).

Most of the recent controversies over this issue, however, have involved social pressure rather than official requirements. These disputes are about whether a person in authority has been too aggressive in urging others within the military to participate in some religious activity. In the past, this might not have caused a dispute, but now there are serious controversies over this issue because people are much more willing to object to the pressure.

The military chaplaincy seems to present a constitutional paradox in that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause restricts the government’s authority to fund and endorse religion, but the military funds chaplains who promote religious messages. Can you explain why, despite these constitutional restrictions, the chaplaincy exists?

The chaplaincy does present something of a paradox. The government pays the chaplains’ salaries. The government also pays for the places of worship and even for the worship materials themselves. So the chaplaincy does appear to be an oddity under the Establishment Clause.

The reason that the chaplaincy is likely constitutional, despite the Establishment Clause restrictions you mentioned, has to do with the principle of religious accommodation. While the Establishment Clause generally prohibits the government from funding and sponsoring religious activities, there is one important exception to this rule: The government may fund or sponsor a religious activity if the government does so to accommodate the religious needs of people who, because of government action, no longer have access to religious resources. Thus, when the military has isolated service members from their normal worship opportunities, the government may then facilitate worship by providing the necessary religious resources, like chaplains. In such situations, the government is merely responding to a religious need and is therefore not promoting religion.

Have courts upheld the constitutionality of the military chaplaincy on the basis of this accommodation principle?

The U.S. Supreme Court has never heard a case directly involving the military chaplaincy. But in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), a landmark decision that prohibited public schools from leading Bible reading, several justices argued that the military chaplaincy is a valid accommodation of religion under the Establishment Clause. The court in Schempp rejected the argument that school-sponsored Bible reading is a permissible way of accommodating students with religious needs. The court said that since students have plenty of opportunities to read the Bible outside of school, whether before or after the school day, school-led Bible reading doesn’t accommodate religious students but rather promotes religion.

In their written opinions on the case, some of the justices contrasted the religious needs of students with those of service members. Because military duties might take service members into isolated and hostile environments, service members might not be able to participate in civilian worship communities or receive spiritual counsel from civilian clergy. Given this inability of service members to worship outside the military base, some of the justices concluded that the military may provide chaplains to accommodate the religious needs of service members. These comments about the chaplaincy, though, don’t have any direct legal effect because the Schempp case dealt only with the constitutional question of Bible reading in public schools.

The only federal court decision directly dealing with the military chaplaincy’s constitutionality is Katcoff v. Marsh (1985), a case decided by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In Katcoff, the 2nd Circuit upheld the U.S. Army’s chaplaincy on the ground that service members have a constitutional right under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to engage in religious worship, a right that the Army would unduly burden if it did not provide chaplains.

Today, it is very unlikely that a court would follow the reasoning in Katcoff because courts have interpreted the Free Exercise Clause much more narrowly over the last 20 years. (For more information on how courts have narrowed the religious liberty guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause, see A Delicate Balance: The Free Exercise Clause and the Supreme Court.) Nevertheless, courts today would probably reach the same outcome – upholding the chaplaincy’s constitutionality – but for different reasons. Instead of finding that the Free Exercise Clause requires the military to establish a chaplaincy, as the Katcoff court did, most courts today would likely find that the Establishment Clause permits the military to provide chaplains so long as it does so in response to the religious needs of service members.

But what if the government responded to these religious needs by providing chaplains in a way that favored some religions over others?

That precise question has been raised in a series of cases, going back a decade, over the way that the U.S. Navy selects chaplains. These lawsuits allege that the Navy has hired chaplains using a “thirds policy.” According to the people bringing the suits, the Navy used a formula dividing its chaplains into thirds: one-third consisting of liturgical Protestant denominations (such as such as Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians); another third consisting of Catholics; and a last third consisting of non-liturgical Protestant denominations (such as Baptists, evangelicals, Bible churches, Pentecostals and charismatics) and other faiths. The lawsuits claim that the Navy’s criteria are unconstitutional because they disfavor non-liturgical Protestants, who make up a great deal more than one-third of the Navy, while Catholics and liturgical Protestants each make up less than one-third.

In April 2007, a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., rejected one of these challenges to the Navy’s chaplain selection criteria. The court held that the Navy had abandoned the thirds policy and said that its current criteria were constitutional because the Navy has broad discretion to determine how to accommodate the religious needs of its service members. This decision was affirmed in 2008 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

What if the military asked a chaplain to pray at an official event and the chaplain offered a prayer specific to his faith tradition – for example, by praying in Jesus’ name? Would that be constitutional?

Your question touches on what has become, over the past couple of years, the most public and heated controversy within the military chaplaincy. To understand this issue, it’s important to distinguish between what is and isn’t involved here. We’re not talking about a faith group’s private worship. Rather, this controversy is about public events, such as a ceremony for a change of command, at which the military might ask a chaplain to give an invocation. In addition, the controversy isn’t about whether the Constitution allows chaplains to provide an invocation at these public events. Instead, this controversy is about whether the chaplains may provide faith-specific prayers.

Some argue that chaplains violate the Establishment Clause by offering faith-specific prayers at public events because such prayers represent the government’s official endorsement of that particular faith and also impose religious experience on those who are required to attend the event. But others say that the military must permit these faith-specific prayers because the chaplains have a constitutional right to pray as their specific faith requires; they argue that this right is guaranteed by either the Free Exercise Clause, which protects religious liberty, or the Free Speech Clause, which limits the government’s ability to restrict the content of private speech. So one side is arguing that the Constitution prohibits faith-specific prayers and another side is arguing that the Constitution guarantees chaplains a right to offer faith-specific prayers.

While no court has yet had to address this question, I think that if this issue were presented, a court would likely disagree with both sides. On the one hand, the Constitution probably permits faith-specific references in prayers at official events, even if service members are required to attend those events, as long as chaplains don’t use the prayers to proselytize. But there would of course be stronger arguments against such faith-specific prayers if they were offered on a regular basis. On the other hand, the Constitution probably permits the military to prohibit chaplains from making any faith-specific references during a public invocation because the government has broad authority to control what public officials say. And I think a court would find that chaplains act as public officials when they speak at official events. Thus, courts are likely to hold that the military has the discretion to decide whether chaplains may offer faith-specific prayers at public events.

How does the “war on terror,” a conflict with obvious religious overtones, relate to this notion of accommodating religious needs? What if, for example, the military wanted to build mosques and fund imams to serve the many devout Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, who, due to the war, might be deprived of adequate religious resources? Would that be constitutionally appropriate?

That’s an interesting and very relevant question, but it’s hard to answer because it raises the unresolved issue of whether the Establishment Clause applies to action taken by the U.S. government outside its territory. Although the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Lamont v. Woods (1991) ruled that the clause does apply overseas, the Supreme Court has never addressed this issue, and there are good arguments on both sides. Some say that the clause should not apply abroad because the two primary purposes of the clause – protecting religious liberty and avoiding religious conflict in America – deal only with actions either occurring within the United States or affecting U.S citizens. Others say that the clause should apply to the government’s overseas conduct because the government’s overseas expenditures on religion can burden American taxpayers in the same way that domestic expenditures do.

Do you anticipate an increasing or decreasing amount of litigation over religion’s role in the military?

I think that the litigation is likely to increase. Service members feel increasingly entitled to have their beliefs respected by those in positions of authority. At the same time, supervisors feel that they are entitled to express their religious beliefs to peers and subordinates. This conflicting sense of entitlement often produces litigation.

Do you expect any of these cases to go to the Supreme Court?

I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court heard any of these cases. I say this for two reasons. One, I think that the military has been working very hard to follow this accommodation principle we’ve been discussing. The military has instructed its chaplains and commanding officers to respect the rights of non-believers and to facilitate the religious needs of all service members. Two, the court has generally deferred to military authorities and hesitated to intervene in issues involving the military. For these two reasons, I think it’s unlikely that the court would agree to hear any of these cases.

http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=191

Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’

'The Last Lecture' by Randy Pausch/Jeffrey Zaslow

CMU professor shares wealth of values

Sunday, April 06, 2008

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For a man whose final lecture at Carnegie Mellon University has been viewed more than 6 million times on the Web, writing a book called "The Last Lecture" would seem to be the very definition of an anticlimax.

But with the help of Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, it doesn't come off that way at all. If anything, "The Last Lecture" has even more emotional punch than when Pausch told a packed auditorium in September that he was dying of pancreatic cancer, and then proceeded to describe all the ways he had been able to fulfill this childhood dreams.

Pausch has said more than once that no one would pay the slightest attention to his nuggets of wisdom if he weren't a 47-year-old man with a terminal illness, leaving behind a wife and three young children.

Realizing that, he has seized every opportunity to build a video and written legacy for his family, especially knowing that two of his children will be too young to have many concrete memories of him if he dies, as he expects, within the next several months.

Much of the book elaborates on the experiences he made famous in his lecture, from the importance of his parents to the value of his mentors, whether it was a football coach or a trusted professor.

But what comes through more strongly than in the lectures is the value Pausch places on hard work and learning from criticism, and his skewering of the prevailing cult of self-esteem.

Recalling his tough scholastic football coach, Jim Graham, he said, "Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process."

"I've heard so many people talk about a downward spiral in our educational system," he writes later, "and I think one key factor is that there is too much stroking and too little real feedback."

Recalling how he used to put his entertainment technology students in working groups and require them to provide written feedback to each other, he remembered one socially abrasive student who was ranked in the bottom quartile of his peers' evaluations.

"He figured that if he was ranked in the bottom 25 percent, he must have been at the 24 percent or 25 percent level ... So he saw himself as 'not so far from 50 percent,' which meant his peers thought he was just fine."

That's when Pausch told the student that in fact he ranked dead last, and as the student tried to deal with the shock, his professor said:

"I used to be just like you. I was in denial. But I had a professor who cared about me by smacking the truth into my head. And here's what makes me so special: I listened. ... I'm a recovering jerk. That's what gives me the moral authority to tell you that you can be a recovering jerk, too."

The book isn't just a compendium of life lessons. It also contains surprisingly honest stories of his upbringing, how he met and wooed his wife, Jai, and why each of his children is special to him.

He relates, for instance, how his wife told him initially that she didn't love him enough to marry him. Of course, she relented, and then he was afraid he had nearly ruined everything when the hot air balloon they got into right after the wedding ceremony had to crash-land in a field outside Pittsburgh.

As they descended toward a set of railroad tracks and an approaching train, Pausch wrote, the balloonist said, "'When this thing hits the ground, run as fast as you can.' These are not the words most brides dream about hearing on their wedding day."

He also wrote about a recent scuba diving trip he took with friends, after he had given his lecture. "We reminisced, we horsed around and we made fun of each other," he said. "Actually, it was mostly them making fun of me for the 'St. Randy of Pittsburgh' reputation I've gotten since my last lecture."

Perhaps the most poignant -- and real -- moment of the book comes when he reveals what Jai said to him after he surprised her with a birthday cake during the lecture.

As she held him on stage, she put her lips next to his ear and whispered, "Please don't die."

It's the one dream he most wishes he could fulfill.

Barring that, he will leave the record of his life and love, and this tiny, powerful volume.

Mark Roth can be reached at mroth@post-gazette.com or at 412-263-1130.
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http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08097/870343-148.stm

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Randy Pausch's Update page
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Political Philosophy, Revelation, and Modernity

James V. Schall. Roman Catholic Political Philosophy. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004. xx + 209 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $68.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0745-4.

Reviewed by: William F. Byrne, Department of Government and Politics, St. John's University, New York.

There is a real need for a book on Roman Catholic political philosophy. The Catholic tradition has generally placed a great premium on philosophical study, including political philosophy. There are many Catholic political philosophers, some of whom are quite explicit in their efforts to integrate their understanding of Christian revelation into their work. However, it remains difficult to say just what "Roman Catholic political philosophy" is, or to identify the precise characteristics (other than perhaps authorship) which distinguish any particular political-philosophical thought as Roman Catholic.

One of the most fitting authors for a book entitled Roman Catholic Political Philosophy would certainly be James Schall. A fixture of Georgetown's Department of Government, and a prolific writer for decades on matters of both political philosophy and religion, Fr. Schall is without question one of the most well-known and respected Catholic political philosophers in America. His more recent books often take the form of long reflective essays, or a series of linked reflective essays; this one is no exception. The present book makes for an illuminating and inspiring read. However, despite its title, it is not the book on Catholic political philosophy; that book remains to be written, if indeed it can be.

Fr. Schall makes clear what this book is not. It is not a book "on what is called 'the social doctrines of the Church'" (p. xiii). Nor is it an effort to reconcile Catholicism with any particular strain of modern political thought, or to explain which regime types are most compatible with Catholic thought. Notably, it is also not "a history or summary of the views of classic or modern Catholic thinkers on politics"; nor is it a book "on comparative religion or philosophy" in a political context (pp. xii-xiii). While each of these topics would, at a minimum, require a sizable book of its own, greater incorporation of at least some of this material would help to justify this book's title. Nevertheless, it should be appreciated for what it is.

The book's actual subject is a very important one. It is political philosophy itself, in relation to the Roman Catholic account of revelation. This work is "a relaxed, literate 'attempt' to present from various angles a rarely heard argument about how the highest things of philosophy, politics, and revelation relate to each other" (p. xiii). Schall's explorations are indeed literate, and go beyond political philosophy narrowly construed to take in broadly the relationship between reason and revelation. To Schall, political philosophy provides a context in which to illuminate and develop some of the themes of Fides et Ratio. It is a sort of nexus at which the relationships of reason and revelation, and of philosophy and faith, play out.

The distinction between political and religious concerns, though important to recognize, is not as great as is supposed by many--especially by modern secularists, who tend to compartmentalize religion when they think of it at all. For one thing, every person, no matter how oriented toward revelation, must live in the world, and cannot wholly escape political matters or the concerns of the social sciences. Moreover, because politics does not represent humankind's ultimate end, good political philosophy must point beyond itself, and the good state must point beyond itself. A point central to Schall, and in his view a key mark of Roman Catholic political philosophy, is this recognition that "the ultimate destiny of each human being, the political animal, is not located in politics" (p. 158). Following Eric Voegelin, Schall recognizes the rise of ideology, and then the exhaustion of ideology, as symptoms of modern society's failure to recognize this basic reality. In closing itself to revelation and rejecting metaphysics, politics becomes its own monstrous metaphysics. Paralleling the phenomenon of political modernity is modern philosophy's hubristic tendency to identify the wholeness of reality with what is knowable through philosophy's methods. We neglect the vital role of revelation at our peril.

Negotiating the relationship between revelation and reason, or between the things of God and things of Caesar, is not easy. Openness to revelation does not, of course, imply some sort of biblically driven public policy in the crude sense; indeed, care must be taken not to put religion in service to a political ideology. Schall explains, "revelation … does not directly teach us about tax policy.... But it does indicate the immense importance of each human being" and gives us some sense of the meaning of the world (p. 76). This does not make political philosophy unimportant; it has its own extremely important (but not completely independent) sphere, and is in need of greater attention. In particular, those with a religious orientation must pay more attention to political philosophy--and, ideally, those already engaged in political philosophy must become more open to revelation--since, "indirectly, revelation has the effect of confirming or strengthening philosophy and political philosophy by providing answers that, when sorted out, make philosophy to be more philosophic and politics to be more 'politic'" (p. 179).

In his reflections Schall draws not only upon key Catholic Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and John Paul II, but on a great variety of other classic and modern sources including Plato and Aristotle and, a Schall trademark, the Peanuts comic strip. Indeed, the book's bibliography could be adopted as a wonderful life reading list. However, Schall identifies his most important sources as Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and it is Strauss's presence which is most heavily felt. This is somewhat problematic in a book on "Roman Catholic political philosophy," not simply because Strauss does not speak from a Catholic or Christian tradition, but because some of Strauss's writings suggest belief in a sharp divide between reason and revelation as well as incompatibility between philosophy and religion. One could argue that Strauss would deny that there could be such a thing as Roman Catholic political philosophy--either it would not really be Roman Catholic, or (more likely) would not really be philosophy.

This is not to say that Schall should not draw upon Strauss. Schall makes excellent use of Strauss; in fact, one of this book's greatest strengths is its effective synthesis of elements of Strauss with elements of Catholic and related thought. It would be helpful, however, if Fr. Schall acknowledged (beyond a passing reference) the tensions which appear to exist among his sources, and engaged those tensions more directly.

Nonetheless, Schall's message is an important one. Once upon a time, much of what he says would have been taken for granted--although it may not have been expressed so precisely or eloquently. Today, he is a much-needed corrective to a de-sanctified world and its fragmented pursuit of knowledge.

Citation: William F. Byrne. "Review of James V. Schall, Roman Catholic Political Philosophy," H-Catholic, H-Net Reviews, July, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=237531213374361.

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Famous Quotes about Life and Living (519 Quotations)

	A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs... Epicurus
	A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry. Anonymous
	A life of ease is a difficult pursuit. William Cowper
	A light heart lives long. Proverb
	A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life. James Allen
	A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too. Anonymous
	A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope. Epictetus
	Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths. Albert Camus
	After all, life is really simple; we ourselves create the circumstances that complicate it. Anonymous
	All of life is a foreign country. Jack Kerouac
	All that man has will he give for his life. Bible
	Always take hold of things by the smooth handle. Thomas Jefferson
	An unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates
	And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. Abraham Lincoln
	And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last. Marcus Aurelius
	Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse. Charles Dickens
	Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway. Steven Coallier
	Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for. David Starr Jordan
	Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars. Henry Van Dyke
	Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. Henry James

Quotations 1 to 20 of 519

Next Last

Religion and Economic Development

Rachel M. McCleary, Stanford & Harvard University
Policy Review, April-May 2008
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Reading the historian Arnold Toynbee’s lectures on the British Industrial Revolution, it is quickly apparent that conditions in England prior to 1760 were in many respects similar to those in developing countries today: Poor infrastructure and communication, lack of technological innovation, no division of labor, a focus on local commerce, and a weak banking system.¹ Surprisingly, the modern study of religion and economics begins with Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), an examination of conditions leading to the Industrial Revolution. In his book, Smith applies his innovative laissez-faire philosophy to several aspects of religion. However, Smith’s fundamental contribution to the modern study of religion was that religious beliefs and activities are rational choices. As in commercial activity, people respond to religious costs and benefits in a predictable, observable manner. People choose a religion and the degree to which they participate and believe (if at all).

Smith’s contribution to the study of religion is not simply theoretical. He held substantive views, for example, on the relationship between organized religion and the state. Smith argued strongly for a disassociation between church and state. Such a separation, he said, allows for competition, thereby creating a plurality of religious faiths in society.² By showing no preference for one religion over others, but rather permitting any and all religions to be practiced, the lack of state intervention (short of violence, coercion, and repression) creates an open market in which religious groups engage in rational discussion about religious beliefs. This setting creates an atmosphere of “good temper and moderation.” Where there is a state monopoly on religion or an oligopoly among religions, one will find zealousness and the imposition of ideas on the public. Where there is an open market for religion and freedom of speech, one will find moderation and reason.

A contemporary of Smith (though they were not acquainted) and a public intellectual during the British Industrial Revolution, John Wesley had much to say about the relationship between religion and economic development, though his perspective differed radically from Smith’s. Wesley (1703–1791), a theologian and the founder of Methodism and the Holiness Movement, championed the two-way causation between religion and economic growth, preaching in 1744, “Gain all you can, Save all you can, Give all you can.” Later, in his famous sermon of 1760, “The Use of Money,” Wesley expounded upon these three points, emphasizing hard work, self-reliance, and mutual aid. Finally, just two years before his death (he lived to be 88), Wesley berated his congregants from the pulpit for their comfortable lifestyle and urged them to give away their fortunes. In the 45 years between these two sermons, Wesley’s followers, by working hard and saving, had raised themselves up into the comfortable middle class. Wesley understood very well the direct causal relationship between religious beliefs and productivity. He also understood well that wealth accumulation could weaken religiosity both in terms of beliefs and participation. Wesley concluded that economic growth was detrimental to religion. Is it? And, if so, must it be?

The two-way causation

Let us look at the two-way causation and, thereby, the relationship between religion and development. First, how does a nation’s economic and political development affect its level of religiosity? When we look at the effects of economic development on religion, we find that overall development — represented by per capita Gross Domestic Product (gdp) — tends to reduce religiosity.³ The empirical evidence supports, to a degree, the secularization thesis which holds that with increased income, people tend to become less religious (as measured by religious attendance and religious beliefs). Economic development causes religion to play a lesser role in the political process and in policymaking, in the legal process, as well as in social arrangements (marriages, friendships, colleagues). There are four primary indicators of the influence of economic development on religion.

Economic development implies a rising opportunity cost of participating in religious services and prayer.

Education. The more educated a person is, the more likely he is to turn to science for explanations of natural phenomena, with religion intended to explain supernatural phenomena and psychological phenomena for which there is no rational explanation. According to this view, the higher the levels of educational attainment, the less religious people will be (negative effect). On the other hand, an increase in education will also spur participation in religious activities, because educated people tend to appreciate social networks and other forms of social capital. Education increases the returns from networks and networking. On this view, religion is just another type of social capital (positive effect). Thus, we cannot conclude that richer societies are less religious because people are better educated.

Value of time (measured by effects on per capita GDP). Economic reasoning tells us that anything that raises the cost of religious activities would — ceteris paribus — reduce these activities. We know that economic development and participation in the workforce raise the value of a person’s time as measured by the value of market wages. Thus, economic development implies a rising opportunity cost of participating in time-intensive activities, such as religious services and prayer. Hence, people will participate less in religious activities because their time is now more valuable to them. So, as a country’s per capita gdp increases, we expect to see a decrease in participation in formal religious activities. Older people and young people — in other words, those persons with a low value of time — will tend to participate more in religious activities.

Life expectancy. People are living longer all over the globe, not just in industrialized countries. Longevity has been rising almost everywhere in the world. Since 1950, it has climbed by larger absolute and percentage amounts in poor countries. With people living longer, participation in certain religions will be low and then rise as the population ages.

Urbanization. Urbanization is another aspect of economic growth that is said to have a substantial negative effect on religious participation. Why? Because in urban areas religious activities compete with others, such as the symphony, theatre, museums, and volunteer activities. Thus, religion takes up your leisure time and competes with other leisure activities, not just work.

We know empirically by doing cross-country analysis that per capita gdp has a significantly negative effect on religion, both in terms of beliefs and participation. This tendency is gradual as countries grow richer. Furthermore, a steady pattern of secularization only applies to a few countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany. Although religiosity declines overall with economic development, the nature of the interaction varies with the dimension of development. For example, increased education has very different effects on religious participation and religiosity from rises in life expectancy or urbanization.

Second, how do religion and religiosity influence economic performance and the nature of political, economic, and cultural institutions? We find that, for a given level of religious participation, increases in core religious beliefs — notably belief in hell, heaven, and an afterlife — tend to increase economic growth. Our interpretation, reminiscent of Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is that religious beliefs raise productivity by fostering individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, and thrift. In contrast, for given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. We think that this negative effect reflects the time and resources used by the religion sector as well as adverse effects from organized religion on economic regulation — for example, restrictions on markets for credit and insurance. To put it another way, the main growth effect that we find is a positive response to an increase in believing relative to belonging (attending). Striking patterns of relatively high belief appear in the Scandinavian countries, Britain, and Japan. Although these countries are not generally viewed as religious, the belief levels are high when compared to the low levels of attendance at formal religious services. Countries with low levels of belief relative to religious participation are Latin American nations and India. We also have some evidence that the stick represented by the fear of damnation is more potent for growth than the carrot from the prospect of salvation.

Now let’s look at how religion influences the four primary indicators of economic development.

Education. We find that religious beliefs are compatible with increased education and knowledge. Religion is attractive to people with higher levels of educational attainment because religious beliefs can be neither proved nor disproved. Educated people engage in speculative reasoning and are better able to think abstractly. Therefore, religion can offer something to them.

Religious beliefs matter for economic outcomes. They reinforce character traits such as hard work, honesty, thrift, and the value of time. Otherworldly compensators — such as belief in heaven, hell, the afterlife — can raise productivity by motivating people to work harder in this life. The Calvinist view of salvation through grace posits that since you cannot know whether or not you are saved, you work conscientiously your whole life (a life of good works). Religious rewards — such as absolution of sin, earning salvific merit by giving to charity — also motivate people to work hard and cultivate virtuous behavior.

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Full-text available, click here.

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