A time for fascists to celebrate
Pyro 1488
lost. However, in recent elections in Austria the far right showed a
stunning performance: they finished second with 27% of the vote, just behind
the Social Democrats, who received 33% of the vote. The far right is now in
a position to form an alliance with the Social Democrats or another party,
which might enable Jorg Haider to become chancellor for 2 years. That's
right, a far right chancellor!
Naturally, the Jews are starting to panic, and the president of Israel urged
Jews to leave Austria. The prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, is
particularly concerned about the rising popularity of the far right in
Austria. This makes the asshole a hypocrite: earlier in his political
career he was a Massad agent, and as such, he participated in terrorist
attacks against promenent Palestinian activists, at times killing entire
families! Yes, he is a cold blooded killer! Of course, the media will not
give off so much as a peep about this. This goes to show the hypocrisy
among the filthy Jews: as they ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, they
refer to others pejoratively as "fascists."
Also, there have been talks between lawyers for slave laborers under the
Nazis and German companies that profited from them. The Jews are upset that
the German companies are not offering more money on the table. Charles
Schumer, a Democratic Senator of New York -- also a Jew -- wants to pass a
bill which would allow Jewish laborers under the Nazis to make claims
against American companies which directly or indirectly profited from them!
Given how the economy is overheated, and the desperate need for U.S.
companies to maintain their stellar performance with steady, rising profits
to justify high market valuations, the Jews may very well play a significant
factor in destroying the economic expansion in the U.S., if the money they
ask for siphons off the growth of our largest companies. In other words,
the money Jews will get will be taken from the average U.S. citizen,
including women and children, possibly creating an impetus for a new
recession.
Right now tobacco companies are under siege by liberals who feel adults who
choose to smoke are too immature to make their own decisions, and thus when
they end up with heart and lung problems as a result of smoking the
companies should fit the bill. Anyone who thinks major American companies
can get by relatively unscathed handing the Jews TENS OF BILLIONS of
billions of dollars in recompense is absolutely insane. Such a largesse
will affect the entire economy. Those ugly, disgusting, hook-nosed bastards
need to leave the American economy alone!
In any case, if the companies are to be handing out tens of billions of
dollars away, why not to innocent children by building parks and
recreational facilities? Why not for exceptionally bright children who
cannot afford a college education due to economic circumstances? Why not to
cure cancer or other diseases? Oh no! The money has to go to filthy, ugly,
disgusting, greedy Jews! Those vile subhumans! Enough of political
correctness, let's get back to our senses and work to get humanity to ascend
to higher a level, morally and intellectually. This guilt trip psychology,
a byproduct of liberalism, produces too much of a stink for the decent folk
within the human race. It's degenerate.
In any case, go watch your fucking Oprah Winfrey!
Pyro
--
From Yahoo! News - 9/5:
Austrian far right scores ballot box success
In Austria, the party whose leader once praised the Nazi era appears to have
captured second place in the national elections. Provincial results show
Chancellor Viktor Klima's Social Democratic Party still in first place with
just over 33% of the vote but, after their worst showing since World War
Two, in need of a coalition partner.
Significantly, the SDP may not reform its 13-year-old coalition with the
conservative People's Party.
With over 27% of the vote Joerg Haider's Freedom Party is in a position to
demand to be part of a new coalition. Currently in second position, the
Freedom Party's showing should reward them with 53 seats in Austria's
183-seat parliament. The Social Democrats are likely to secure 65 seats, the
People's Party 52 seats and the Greens 13 seats.
Populist Haider is best known for having admiring Adolf Hitler's "orderly"
employment policies and for praising Waffen SS Storm Troopers as "decent men
of character."
Haider scored his success off the back of a campaign which mixed xenophobic
rhetoric with promises to boost support for Austrian families and slash
bureaucracy. Haider has promised to freeze on immigration and said he would
block enlargement of the European Union. But Haider - who has compared
himself to Britain's Tony Blair - insisted: "We are not extremists but we
think of our own country."
The Freedom Party's electoral success already represents the most radical
realignment of domestic politics in Austria since 1945 though the final
result may not be known until October 11 or 12 when all outstanding votes
will be counted.
RenoDeCaro
LEVY: TIES TO AUSTRIA QUESTIONABLE IF HAIDER JOINS GOVERNMENT
Israel will reconsider its relations with Austria if the far-right,
neo-Nazi, Freedom Party is included in the Government, Foreign Minister
David Levy said on Wednesday, THE JERUSALEM POST reported. "This is not a
hint; it is a clear message," Levy added. If the party is included, he
said, "the entire Austrian government that represents or is meant to
represent the Austrian people will be tainted." Levy added that the rise of
a neo-Nazi party "reveals a grave and worrisome phenomenon and evokes
repulsion toward the views and feelings or lack of feelings of the citizens
of Austria."
Levy called on Austria to show responsibility and exclude Joerg Haider's
Freedom Party, which became the second largest in Sunday's elections.
Regional Development Minister Shimon Peres, meanwhile, has canceled a
trip to Vienna planned for Sunday. Peres was scheduled to speak in Austria
in an international forum. His office put out a statement on Wednesday
saying that despite the great regard he has for the organizers of the forum,
this would not be a good time to be in Austria.
jum...@my-deja.com
Subject: Crash in Food biotech may be imminent.
New Newsgroup reporting problems.
From: "Jaan Suurkla" <m-2...@mailbox.swipnet.se>
Date: 1999/09/30
Newsgroups: aus.invest
Recent events in the food biotech (genetic engineering) field indicate
that it is approaching a crash. We issued a warning to investors in
July about the risks with food biotech shares. Since then the
situation has further aggravated and about one month later, Europe's
biggest Bank, Deutsche bank, issued a similar warning to over 1000
instituitional investors all over the world. Their experts think
Genetically Engineered Foods may face the same fate as Nuclear Energy
business did in the US.
For more, see our recently created Newspage: "Problems with
Genetically Engineered Food" at http://www.psrast.org/probobst.htm .
It presents the latest news in chronological order.
Among major Companies dealing with food biotechnology are:
Monsanto, Novarits, Hoechst/Agrevo, Dupont, Mycogen, Rhone Poulenc,
Astra/Zeneca, Agritrope, Seminis Vegetable Seeds/Ashgrow.
Jaan Suurkula M.D.
Chairman of
"Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and
Technology" (PSRAST)
===============================================
http://www.psrast.org/probobst.htm
----------------------------------
Newspage
"Problems with Genetically Engineered Food"
The latest news
Last updated Oct 04, 1999.
The news are listed chronologically starting with July 1999. The
latest addition first. For news before July, please click here.
About this newspage
This newspage is for you who want brief, condensed reports of
selected significant news and who appreciates to have (in
suitable cases) brief proffesional comments based on broad
interdisciplinary knowledge of the field. This service is
intended for journalists, investors, governments as well as the
general public.
The news updates are also entered in the article "Problems and
Obstacles in Food Biotechnology" which is recommended for
newcomers as it gives a comprehensive overview of the problems
and hazards and includes older news. After reading that article,
this page is recommended for future follow-ups. If you are
interested, don't forget to add it to your bookmarks/favorites.
Investors are advised to start with our brief Message to
investors. If you want news in greater detail, "Genetically
Manipulated Food News" publishes whole articles from all over
the world. Another good source, used by the former, is Richard
Wolfson's GE News Reports If you know very little about genetic
engineering, we recommend What is genetic engineering?", a brief
and simple explanation of genes and genetic engineering.
Our impartial evaluation of the safety GE foods has resulted in
the conclusion that the release and use of GE foods cannot be
justified today, for more, see e.g. "Are there any benefits with
genetically engineered foods?" Even if our evaluation has been
impartial, we are strongly partial in favor of responsible and
safe application of new technologies. This is why we focus on
the problems with this technology.
Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application
of Science and Technology (PSRAST)
E-mail: in...@psrast.org
News
[Added: 04/10 1999]
Monsanto investing in water
Monsanto, the world's largest seed and chemicals company has
spotted a new business opportunity--water. Monsanto estimates
that providing safe water is a several billion dollar market.
According to Mr Robert Farley of Monsanto "what you are seeing
is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a
consolidation of the entire food chain. Since water is as
central to food production as seed is, and without water life is
not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control
over water. During 1999, Monsanto plans to establish a new water
business, starting with India and Mexico, since both these
countries are facing water shortages."
Monsanto has also started to buy itself into the aquaculture
industry, an area of activity which has shown itself to be
catastrophic for the environment and for the livelyhoods of
fishermen and ricegrowers in the Far East. Pressure is being put
on the Indian government to reverse a Supreme Court order
banning industrial shrimp farming because of its damaging
consequences. (Source: Article by Vandana Shiva in The Ecologist
29:5 August/September 1999)
Comment
The explicit endeavor of Monsanto to establish extensive control
over the food chain is creating increasing worry and protests in
the Third World.
One of the most active protestors is the writer of the quoted
article, Dr Vandana Shiva in India, who leads a Nation-wide
"Monsanto Quit India Campaign" with the participation of over
1000 grassroots organizations.
Fears have been expressed that this is a new strategy of the
United States government (through its close ally, Monsanto) to
achieve political control over countries. Such fears may result
in backlashes causing similar or even greater problems for
Monsanto as the reactions against GE food. In the GE food case,
Monsanto greatly underestimated the vigilance of consumers. In
the water case, they may have underestimated the reactions that
their "power over food" strategy may evoke in the Third World. -
Especially as it appears to be part of a strategy to force the
already controversial Food Biotechnology on them. [End]
[Added: 30/09 1999]
Plastics from GE crops not profitable
Monsanto has been developing GE crops capable of producing
plastic materials. Recently the company released a story to the
press in UK that biodegradable plastics could be developed this
way. However British BBC noted that the yield of plastics from
such crops is too low to be profitable. Scarlett Foster,
spokeswoman for Monsanto, has since confirmed that this way of
producing plastics is not economically viable. So Monsanto
stopped this development project already in 1998. (Source:
Reuters, Sept 28).
Comment
Other reasons than economical may be more important for not
developing such a product. Questions have been raised about
potentially serious ecological effects from plastic containing
plants. What might, for example, happen to animals, beneficial
birds and insects eating parts of the plants? What might happen
to the ecology if such genes got astray (which they tend to do)
and spread uncontrollably in weeds and wild plants?
Environmental complications would need careful interdisciplinary
ecological long term investigations before release can be
considered safe of plants producing plastics.
Why did Monsanto bring out information about a GE product that
they already found unprofitable in 1998? Was this another failed
attempt to improve the scarred image of genetic engineering?
[End]
[Added: 27/09 1999]
Cattle at some US farms reported to refuse to eat GE feed
Some farmers in the US have, independently of each other,
reported cases of cattle and other animals avoiding GE crops as
food. In one case the cattle went through a field of Roundup
ready corn, not touching it and broke through a fence and ate
non-GE corn. In another case weight loss occurred in the cattle
after switching to GE feed. An organic farmer says he had a
great problem with deer eating his non-GE soy beans, while the
field with Roundup Ready beans across the road was left
untouched by them. Likewise raccoons did not touch any Bt corn
but ate plenty of non-GE corn.
These are just a few examples of similar reports from separate
sources.
After four months of collecting such anecdotal evidence from
Kansas and Wisconsin, reporter Steven Sprinkel thinks it is time
to make a more thorough investigation. (Source: US farmer,
ACRES, USA Special Report, Steven Sprinkel, 19 September 1999.)
Comment
This is anecdotal evidence, of course not proving the case. But
concordant reports from different sources cannot just be
dismissed. They deserve scientific verification. If the
observations can be verified, the next question appears - is
this behavior caused by just some impalatability or may it be
that the animals are sensing unhealthy qualities of the GE
crops? Animals are known to have a good ability to sense harmful
qualities in their food. This highlights the great need for long
term GE feeding studies as we have long been demanding. Would
they reveal additional cases of such harmful effects as reported
by Dr Pusztai in the long term study of rats eating GE potatoes?
[End]
[Added: 27/09 1999]
Monsanto hints change of biotech policy - may abandon GE in UK
Monsanto, has offered to help plant breeders create new
varieties of crops using traditional cross-breeding techniques.
It has a large gene databases of "genetic profiles" that they
think could help traditional breeders develop crops suitable for
specific soil, pest types and other environmental conditions.
While formerly crossbreeding was time consuming, based on trial
and error, this knowledge might contribute to more rapid and
efficient breeding.
Patrick Holden of the Soil Association participated at a meeting
with Monsanto's senior executives, commented: "What was said has
huge significance. It shows that Monsanto is thinking about
reversing their whole strategy. We believe Monsanto is open to a
full rethink of what it is doing."(Source: The Observer, UK,
26/9/99)
Comment
This news came 11 days after we suggested that Monsanto might be
the next major company to change GE policy, see "Two major
biotech companies consider pullout from GE business" from 16/09.
However, it should be noted that this presently goes only for
the UK as a response to the strong resistance to GE crops there.
It cannot be taken as an indication that Monsanto is about to
change its policy worldwide. As a compensation, the company
might even consider increasing it present efforts to establish
strongholds in developing countries. [End]
[Added: 26/09 1999]
Europe's leading pet food producer goes GE free
Europe's leading dry dog food producer, Royal Canin, vowed on
the 15 th of Sept not to include GE ingredients in any of its
pet food lines. The decision by the Paris-based firm comes after
British pet food producer Pascoe's Group Plc launched the
country's first wholly organic, non-GM dog food line last month.
(Source: http://WWW.PLANETARK.ORG/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=3681,
September 16 1999). [End]
Leading British food wholesale company goes GE free
The biggest distributor of frozen foods in Britain, Brake Bros.,
has now eliminated genetically engineered ingredients from all
its products. The company is a leading supplier to hospitals,
hotels, restaurants and schools. Brake Bros' chief executive,
Ian Player, thinks this will give the company a competitive
advantage especially on the health and education side. (Source:
Electronic Telegraph, UK, Lauren Mills, Sept. 19 /99). [End]
[Added: 25/09 1999]
Important breakthrough for GE-labeling in the US
Government agencies of the US intend to develop plans for
labeling of products containing GE ingredients as a response to
the resistance in the European market. According to consultant
Charles Benbrook the decision was made at a meeting between
representatives of the U.S. Agriculture Department, the Food and
Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
(Source: Reuters 24/09/99)
Comment
This decision represents a radical change in US policy. So far
the United States has been strongly opposed to GE labeling and
has been lobbying hard against it in international regulatory
bodies. However, it has become more and more isolated
internationally in this question, and is now apparently
realizing the untenability of its position. Labeling is likely
to greatly reduce the demand for GE products. [End]
[Added: 25/09 1999]
Australian Farmer Federation goes GE-free
Policy decision of the Western Australian Farmers Federation:
"That the Federation oppose the release of 'Genetic
Modification' of both livestock and other farm produce and that
we continue to promote R&D of those products by natural means."
(Source: Rural Press Report, September 15, 1999) [End]
[Added: 24/09 1999]
Large German retailer goes GE free after initially resisting it
The German retailer Edeka has joined other German companies in
declaring that it will not use genetically modified (GM)
ingredients in its products. Edeka joins other big German
retailers like Tengelmann and Rewe, which after negotiations
with Greenpeace, have recently declared that they will remove GM
ingredients from own-brand products. Edeka had previously
refused to join the initiative towards GM-free products.
(Source: AgBiotecNet 15 Sept 1999). [End]
[Added: 24/09 1999]
Governmental expert commission in Paraguay recommends GE free
national policy
In Paraguay, a Bio-Safety Commission of experts, citizen
organizations and parliamentarians designated by the government
recommended that the executive office declare the nation "free
of genetically modified organisms." Soya is Paraguay's primary
agricultural product and the commission's pronouncement would be
a serious obstacle to the transnationals' plans for GM products,
indicated the citizen organizations. (Source: AgBiotechNet Sept
15 1999) [End]
[Added: 24/09 1999]
GE soy production hits back on US agriculture
As a response to the greatly increased demand for GE free soy,
European farmers are now planning to grow new hardy varieties of
soy that are possible to grow in the European Climate. So far
the United States has been the world leading source of soy which
today is a used extensively by the food industry all over the
world. The European Union countries have imported 15 million
tonnes of soy annually, mainly from the US.
Today a major part of US soy is genetically engineered and
producers have difficulties in segregating GE and GE free soy.
There are doubts whether GE free soy producing countries will be
able to segregate the soy varieties in a reliable way.
Therefore, the European food industry is expected to prefer
buying from countries where no GE soy is grown.
The European farmers expect a large demand in Europe for their
GE free soy which will be competitive against the transatlantic
sources also because of lower transportation costs. Because of
considerable acreage surplus, there is plenty of farm land
available. Already growing soy ha been more profitable in Europe
than many other crops. Unlike many other special crops, soy is
technically easy to grow, not requiring any special machinery or
production modification. So it is easy for farmers to switch to
soy production.
Consequently, a great increase of European soy production can be
expected. This threatens to result in a great loss to United
States agriculture. (Source: Farming News 17 September 1999
"Hardy varieties put soya boom on the cards")[End]
[Added: 18/09 1999]
Australian consortium establishes GE free certification
An Australian consortium announced on August 11 that it had been
formed so as to establish a label and certification process for
GE ingredient free foods. The US firm "Genetic ID", a world
leader in developing ultrasensitive methods for detecting
unwanted GE genes in food, has been engaged for ensuring GE free
status of the products.(Source: AP, 14/09 1999, CANBERRA,
Australia).[End]
[Added: 16/09 1999]
Two major biotech companies consider pullout from GE business
In August this year AstraZeneca in UK indicated that it might
sell its agrichemicals business including the section dealing
with development of GE foods.
Novartis in Switzerland, which is a another major biotech
company, indicated on the 15th of September that it is considers
to spin off its agribusiness division, which includes the GE
section.
Both companies are also leading drug producers. Analysts believe
that involvement in GE food development may damage the image of
the pharmaceutical business.
But decreased sales due to increasing resistance to GE foods is
probably the major factor contributing to the doubts about
continued involvement in GE business. Because of this, Novartis
already earlier this year announced a reduction by 1.100 jobs in
its agricultural division. Now Novartis has announced that the
job cuts will be even larger. (Source: Guardian, UK 16/09 1999)
Comment
What company will be next to announce doubts about its future
commitments to GE? - Monsanto in the US perhaps? It is the
world's GE business leader.
The company has experienced a fall of about 40% of its share
price in one year (from 62 USD in September 1998 to 37 USD in
the middle of September 1999). [End]
[Added: 15/09 1999]
Reputed GE technology supporter warns about GE foods - a major
blow to the GE industry
Dr Andrew Chesson, vice chairman of European Commission
scientific committee on animal nutrition, is well known to have
been a supporter of food biotechnology. Now he admits that
current food safety tests are unreliable. Therefore he warns
that potentially disastrous effects may come from undetected
harmful substances in GE foods. (Source: Daily Mail, UK, 13 Sept
1999).
Comment
Through this warning, Dr Chesson joins in with another
internationally reputed food scientist, Dr Arpad Pusztai.
However, when Pusztai expressed a very similar warning in August
1998, he was fired and became subject to strong attempts at
destroying his credibility. Clear lies were used and flawed
"evaluations" of his research were made, see World renowned
scientist lost his job when he warned about GE foods - The
Pusztai case. We can only hope that Chesson will not be another
victim of the systematic endeavor of the biotech lobby to
suppress the truth.
PSRAST has long been warning for this hazard, pointing out the
inadequacy of present testing (see Substantial equivalence
versus scientific food safety assessment). We have been greatly
worried about the refusal among leading scientists in the field
to admit this in spite of the obvious reasons we have pointed
out. We find it very satisfying that now a leading EU scientist
agrees with us. It seems that the powerful biotechnology lobby
begins to loose its censoring grip over leading scientists.
The only way to avoid the potentially serious danger from GE
foods is to immediately withdraw all of them from the market.
This includes all the GE foods approved today in the US, Europe
and elsewhere as there has not been adequate testing in any
single case. [End]
[Added: 15/09 1999]
Addition to our conclusion in the overview article "Problems and
Obstacles in Food Biotechnology"
Now that it is becoming recognized that all presently approved
GE foods are unsafe, because the test methods used are
inadequate for detecting unexpected harmful substances, it
should a matter or short time before they all have to be
withdrawn for the market. [End]
[Added: 14/9 1999]
First case of insolvency due to investor pessimism about GE
prospects Axis Genetics, a producer in UK of vaccines from GE
plants, has entered insolvency proceedings. The reason,
according to the Chief executive Iain Cubitt is that investors
are worried about the prospects of companies dealing with GE.
(Source: PA News, September 7, 1999) [End]
[Added: 11/09 1999]
The European Union makes great cuts in GE crop research
programme Great cuts in the research programme of the European
Union to develop new genetically modified crops and plants are
planned. The move reflects increasing political and public
concern over genetic engineering of plants. Scientists believe
it will make it impossible to realize the former European dreams
of becoming a world leader in the biotechnology.
The future now does not look bright for biotech researchers
across Europe.
The new program of EU has the emphasis more on research into
health, environment and sustainable agriculture. (Source: The
Times, UK, Monday September 6th 1999) [End]
[Added: 11/09 1999]
American company decides to segregate GE crops
Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) has decided to segregate
their genetically altered crops from conventional crop. The
American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) thinks that this sends
a distinct signals to consumers in America, Europe and Asia that
US farmers want to respect the wishes of consumers (Gary
Goldberg, Chief Executive Officer of the ACGA in Sept 1999).
ACGA questioned whether it would be in the best interest of US
farmers to continue growing GE crops considering the resistance
against GMOs in Europe, Asia and the United States. [End]
[Added: 10/09 1999:]
Leading Japanese food company tells US farmers it will not by GE
soy and corn
Consolidated Grain and Barge Company (CGB), the subsidiary of a
leading agribusiness company in Japan, Itochu Corp, sent a
message on Sept 1999 to US farmers that it will not buy GE corn
and soy. They indicated that it will be profitable for farmers
to segregate non GMO grains. Itochu Corp has substantial
agri-food business interests in Thailand, China, Malaysia,
Indonesia and the US. (Source: Reuters 1 Sept 1999).[End]
[Added: 09/09 1999:]
Connection between glyphosate (Roundup from Monsanto) and Cancer
A recent study by oncologists Dr. Lennart Hardell and Dr. Mikael
Eriksson in Sweden, concluded that exposure to the herbicide
glyphosate was associated with increased risk for Non-Hodgkin
Lymphoma (NHL), a kind of cancer. They stress that with the
rapidly increasing use of glyphosate since the time the study
was carried out, further epidemiological studies should be
done.(15 March 1999 Journal of American Cancer Society).
Plants resistant to Glyphosate represent a considerable portion
of genetically engineered crops.[End]
[Added: 08/09 1999:]
European Union signals stricter application of the precautionary
principle
The European Union's environment commissioner, Sweden's Margot
Wallström said in a hearing at the European Parliament that
legislation is required to guarantee that companies are liable
for any environmental damage caused by the products they
manufacture. She also told the environment committee of the
Parliament that the burden should be on companies to prove that
products they introduce are safe. She intends to push for a
rapid implementation of comprehensive rules on liability.
(Source: Reuters, Sept 2 1999)
Comment
Wallström's statement agrees closely with our opinion that the
precautionary principle should be strictly applied on all
introductions of new products with potential environmental or
health impact. A strict application of this principle would
require a full moratorium on GE crops and foods that would
take several years as it takes long time to prove the safety
of these products in a scientifically satisfactory way.
Wallström's initiative would actually be an implementation of
the principal agreement at the Rio De Janeiro UN environment
meeting of 1992. There it was decided that new potentially
hazardous products should not be introduced until it has been
ascertained that they are safe. Regrettably, industrial
lobbies including the biotech lobby have made considerable
efforts to invalidate this principle. For more, see
"Introduction to the precautionary principle. [End]"
[Added: 27/08 1999:]
Europé's biggest bank advises investors to sell biotech shares
In August 1999, Deutsche Bank released a report saying that
increasing negative feelings are creating problems for biotech
companies including Monsanto and Novartis. It has been sent to
thousands of the largest institutional investors in the world.
The report notes that Monsanto spent over $1.5m in vain to in an
attempt to win the English consumers. The bank finds that food
producing companies, food retailers, grain processors, and
governments are indicating that they are not ready for GE foods.
The bank warns that culturing GE crops might bring losses to
farmers. And that food companies will find it too risky to sell
food with GE ingredients.
Finally the report warns that the biotech stock market could
collapse.
Already nine months ago, the Washington analysts of the Deutsche
Bank, Frank Mitsch and Jennifer Mitchell, warned that the
biotech industry seems to meet the same future as the nuclear
industry did in the US. Now they are surprised how rapidly this
prediction appears to come true.
Comment
On July 12, we issued a warning about the risk of investing in
the food biotech sector, see "PSRAST issues warning to Food
Biotech investors" (at the end of this page). It is very
satisfying to find that a leading finance analyst now follows
suit. [End]
[Added: 26/08 1999]
US consumer union asks government for GE food labeling
On August 24, 1999, Consumers Union, a leading U.S. consumer
group asked the government to require labels on food products
containing ingredients made from genetically modified
crops.[End]
[Added: 19/08 1999:]
Major Blow against Genetically Engineered Hormone (rBGH) Milk
The FAO organ, Codex Alimentiarius decided in August 1999 to
support the rBGH moratorium of the European Union. This ruling
represents the first major blow against the GE industry.
Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH)has been extensively
used to increase milk production in cows in the US since FDA
approved it in 1994.
However it causes suffering to cows, including udder infections
(resulting in increased antibiotics concentrations in milk),
reproductive problems and lameness. In addition it causes
increases of a hormone that has been proven to increase the risk
of breast and prostatic cancer in humans. In spite of this
Monsanto has been pressing hard to make the European Union
approve its use.
The handling of this issue by the producer Monsanto, including
suppression and manipulation of research data, gives reasons to
doubt the company's reliability in GE food safety issues
according to Professor Samuel Epstein, see Codex Alimentiarius
decided to support rBGH moratorium. [EL].[End]
[Added: 08 1999]
Australia and New Zealand decides to label GE foods
New Zealand and Australian Health Ministers on August 3rd
decided that all foods containing GE ingredients should be
labeled. In August 1999 one of the country's biggest food
manufacturers, Heinz Watties said it is working towards becoming
free of GE ingredients.
US farmers beginning to hesitate about cultivating GE crops
[Added: 08 1999]
According to GE seed dealer Doughty there is a feeling among the
farmers that the Biotech companies have let them down by trying
to force GE foods upon Europeans without proving that they are
safe (see "US farmers fear GM crop fallout" BBC News 14 july
1999). [End]
[Added: 07 1999]
British doctors call for Biotech Moratorium
The British Medical Association (BMA), which represents 115,000
doctors, recently called for a complete moratorium on biotech
crops in Britain until extensive research is carried out to
determine the safety of these crops. The BMA report, The Impact
of Genetic Modification on Agriculture, Food and Health, says
that detailed research is needed into possible toxicity of GM
food and whether eating it could lead to the development of new
allergies and antibiotic resistance in humans. [End]
PSRAST issues warning to Food Biotech investors
On July 12, 1999, PSRAST issued a warning saying a/o: "We are
convinced that, considering the steadily growing and world-wide
opposition due to increasing awareness of the truth about
Genetically Engineered (GE) foods, it won't take long before a
global moratorium will be agreed upon." It was sent to stock
investment newsgroups, leading stock investment advisors in the
US (including Deutsche Bank) and on-line stock investment news
media. First published: July 5, 1999.
For a summary of news before July 1999, please click here.
For a news overview article containing all the news and additional
information, go to "Problems and Obstacles in Food Biotechnology"
If you want to learn more about genetic engineering, we suggest
you start with:
What is genetic engineering?" [EL]
Or else, for further study, we suggest you go to the list of
starting points on the start page.
Do you want to inform friends about this page? You can
comfortably do so at our website announcer page.
We want to thank Ronnie Cummins, editor of Foodbytes, and
Richard Wolfson, editor of GE News Reports and Mark Griffiths,
editor of "Will GM crops deliver benefits to farmers?", for
valuable information used in this document.
"Genetically Engineered Food - Safety Problems"
Published by PSRAST
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Philip G. Cerny,
"Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action,"
International Organization, Vol. 49, no. 4 (Autumn 1995)
In both modern domestic political systems and the modern international
system, the state has been the key structural arena within which
collective action has been situated and undertaken, as well as
exercising structural and relational power as an actor in its own
right. However, the state is being not only eroded but also
fundamentally transformed within a wider structural context. The
international system is no longer simply a states system; rather it is
becoming increasingly characterized by a plural and composite - or
what I have elsewhere called "plurilateral" - structure.(1) This
transformation has significant consequences for the logic of
collective action. The word "globalization" often is used to represent
this process of change. Globalization is neither uniform nor
homogeneous; its boundaries are unclear and its constituent elements
and multidimensional character have not as yet been adequately
explored.(2) But by reshaping the structural context of rational
choice itself, globalization transforms the ways that the basic rules
of the game work in politics and international relations and alters
the increasingly complex payoff matrices faced by actors in rationally
evaluating their options.
In contrast, the state has played a key role in defining the character
of the global discipline of international relations and the domestic
discipline of political science. The classic statement of this
position is found in the first paragraph of Aristotle's Politics:
Observation shows us, first, that every polis (or state) is a
species of association, and, secondly, that all associations
are instituted for the purpose of attaining some good - for all
men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which
is, in their view, a good. We may therefore hold that all
associations aim at some good; and we may also hold that the
particular association which is the most sovereign of all, and
includes all the rest, will pursue this aim most, and will thus
be directed to the most sovereign of all goods. This most
sovereign and inclusive association is the polis, as it is
called, or the political association.(3)
Michael Oakeshott described the state in the Western constitutional
tradition as a "civil association" - the sole purpose of which is to
enable other, more circumscribed social, political, and economic
activities to take place and which is necessary (but not sufficient)
for the pursuit of those other activities. The existence of such a
civil association enables socially legitimate collective action to be
undertaken in the first place. Oakeshott distinguishes this from an
"enterprise association," which has particular ends and can be
dissolved when those ends are no longer or are unsatisfactorily
pursued.(4) In the modern study of international relations, the state
has constituted the key unit of collective action, while the
interaction of states has been the very object of inquiry; similarly,
in the domestic arena, the state has both encompassed the political
system and constituted a potentially autonomous collective agent
within that field.(5)
Globalization, however, is changing all that. Globalization is defined
here as a set of economic and political structures and processes
deriving from the changing character of the goods and assets that
comprise the base of the international political economy - in
particular, the increasing structural differentiation of those goods
and assets. "Structures" are more or less embedded sets - patterns -
of constraints and opportunities confronting decision-making agents
("institutions" simply being more formalized structures); "processes"
are dynamic patterns of interaction and change that take place on or
across structured fields of action.(6) Structural differentiation
increasingly is spreading across borders and economic sectors, driving
other changes and resulting in the increasing predominance of
political and economic structures and processes that (1) are
frequently (although not always) more transnational and multinational
in scale (i.e., are in significant ways more inclusive) than the
state, (2) potentially have a greater impact on outcomes in critical
issue-areas than does the state (i.e., may in effect be more
"sovereign"), and (3) may permit actors to be decisionally autonomous
of the state. In particular, I argue that the more that the scale of
goods and assets produced, exchanged, and/or used in a particular
economic sector or activity diverges from the structural scale of the
national state - both from above (the global scale) and from below
(the local scale) - and the more that those divergences feed back into
each other in complex ways, then the more that the authority,
legitimacy, policymaking capacity, and policy-implementing
effectiveness of states will be challenged from both without and
within. A critical threshold may be crossed when the cumulative effect
of globalization in strategically decisive issue-areas undermines the
general capacity of the state to pursue the common good or the
capacity of the state to be a true civil association; even if this
threshold is not crossed, however, it is arguable that the role of the
state both as playing field and as unit becomes structurally
problematic.
Most of the literature on collective choice or collective action
focuses on options and choices that actors (or players) make within
the context of a particular payoff matrix or set of alternative payoff
matrices - i.e., within existing sets of constraints and
opportunities, or rewards and penalties - which confront the players.
However, the focus of the analysis here is on the structural context
within which collective action takes place, rather than at specific
processes or outcomes of choice in a given setting. Choices are always
made within specific "structured fields of action."(7) Structurally
diverse fields elicit different strategies and tactics. Furthermore,
such fields are themselves made up of complex multilayered structures
that incorporate distinct and often asymmetric structural levels -
i.e., different games with different payoff matrices. Finally, of
course, their structural form can change over time.
The analysis here will focus on the changing nature and scale of
public goods and private goods (expanding on the work of Manur Olson)
and on the relationship between specific assets and nonspecific assets
(expanding on the work of Oliver Williamson) as the bases of both
political-institutional and industrial market structure.(8) "Goods"
and "assets" are broadly interchangeable terms that refer to tangible
or intangible property, effects, wealth, and other resources.
Whereas the term "goods" is more likely to be used for items or
commodities that are themselves produced and/or traded, from raw
materials to final products, the term "assets" is more likely to be
applied to the production facilities or systems of production by which
goods are produced. However, the two terms are not easily
distinguished linguistically, and the overlap between them both in the
real world and in analytical usage is great. Indeed, Olson and
Williamson each uses his preferred term as an overarching category or
genus implicitly including the other.
This article focuses on the development of particular historical
matrices or patterns of imbrication between economic-organizational
and political-institutional structures; I call such composite patterns
"political economies of scale." In small-scale societies, goods and
assets - and the structures and institutions that stabilize and
regulate them - remain relatively undifferentiated. However, as the
scale of goods and assets expands, major structural gaps can develop
between different types of assets and between public goods and private
goods. In particular, as European societies and economies grew in the
late feudal and early capitalist periods, such a gap was filled by the
emergence of the modern nation-state as an organizational form for
providing public goods across both domestic and international
arenas.(9) Moreover, the development of scale economies in both the
economic system and the political order during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries dramatically reinforced and expanded the
scope of this institutional isomorphism. A powerful structural
convergence developed between the second industrial revolution
economy, on the one hand, and the bureaucratic state, on the other.
Notions of the modern state even today inordinately reify the
characteristics of this period. In recent decades, however, an
accelerating divergence has taken place between the structure of the
state and the structure of industrial and financial markets in the
complex, globalizing world of the third industrial revolution.
There is a new disjuncture between institutional capacity to provide
public goods and the structural characteristics of a much
larger-scale, global economy. I suggest here that today's "residual
state" faces crises of both organizational efficiency and
institutional legitimacy. The conclusion derives a set of more complex
hypotheses from the overall framework as an agenda for future
research.
Goods, assets, and political economies of scale The development of the
modern state and the growth of capitalism involve a complex process of
interaction between cross-cutting structural dimensions: first,
between politics and economics and, second, between market and
hierarchy.
Central to such developments are "political economies of scale," in
which specific political structures - and the forms of action they
ostensibly foster or dictate - appear to be more or less efficient in
stabilizing, regulating, controlling, or facilitating particular
economic activities. Different economic processes are said to be
characterized by different minimum efficient scales, given existing
technology and size of market demand. Some optimal plant sizes remain
small; others exhibit increasing returns to scale - that is, greater
efficiency the bigger the factory or distribution system.(10) Thus, in
some cases, big is economically the most efficient, whereas in other
cases small is beautiful. In the case of political economies of scale,
the concept is expanded to include the scale of state structures,
institutions, and processes and the economic tasks, roles, and
activities they perform. Optimal political economies of scale
therefore continually shift, adjusting to technological, sociological,
and political change. Indeed, they have been shifting dramatically in
the late twentieth century, both upward to the transnational and
global levels and downward to the local level. In this more fluid
environment, actors' choices have significant consequences for the
changing structure of the state and, indeed, for the wider evolution
of politics and society.
It is mistaken to assume that state structures are overwhelmingly
hierarchical and bureaucratic in some inherent way, while economic
structures are based essentially on market exchange.(11) On the
contrary, both state and economy are complex compounds of market and
hierarchy as well as the outcome of the interaction between politics
and economics. Evolution of political-economic structures results from
the interaction of independent changes along each dimension
(market/hierarchy and politics/economics) and from complex feedback
effects that occur as the consequence of that interaction. For a state
to approximate an overarching public role of the classical type would
require it to have real and effective organizational capacity to
shape, influence, and/or control designated economic activities (that
is, those perceived to be the most socially significant such
activities). In other words, it must stabilize, regulate, promote, and
facilitate economic activity generally as well as exercise other forms
of politically desired and/or structurally feasible control over
more-specific targeted processes of production and exchange. The core
of this problematic lies in the character of the different kinds of
material and nonmaterial resources and values that are needed and/or
desired by individuals and by society - that is, in the different
kinds of goods or assets (including services) being produced and
exchanged, whether through the state or through nonstate economic
mechanisms. Identifying the structural characteristics of different
goods and/or assets is crucial to understanding what rational players
are likely to do in different situations.
I begin, like others, by distinguishing between two main polar types
of good or asset. The best-known is Olson's contrast between public
goods (those that are nondivisible in crucial ways and from the use of
which specific people cannot be easily or effectively excluded), on
the one hand, and private goods (those that are both divisible and
excludable), on the other.(12) Note that "public" and "private" in
this context do not refer to who owns the goods but to the specific
structural features of the goods themselves: (1) whether the good(s)
in question can in practice be divided between different users/owners,
or whether they are composed of inseparable parts of a wider,
inherently integrated entity; and (2) whether some people can be
effectively excluded or prevented from using/owning the good(s) in
question, or whether to make them available for one is to make them
available to all.
A second distinction, found in institutional economics, is that which
Williamson makes between specific and nonspecific assets.(13) This
distinction is based upon two dimensions. The first is that of
economies of scale in production, distribution, or exchange. Where
returns to scale are high, then the more units of a good that are
produced in a single integrated production process, the lower will be
the marginal unit cost of production compared with smaller separate
production processes; in asset terms, this means that the value of the
entity kept as a whole would in theory be far more valuable than its
"breakup" price. The second dimension is that of transaction costs,
i.e., those costs incurred in the process of attempting to fix an
efficiency price for an asset and actually to exchange it for another
substitute asset. Transaction costs normally include negotiation
costs, monitoring costs, enforcement costs, and the like. A specific
asset is one for which there is no easily available substitute. Its
exchange would involve high transaction costs, high economies of
scale, or both, leading to difficulty in finding efficiency prices and
ready markets. In turn, different types of good or asset are said to
be more or less efficiently provided through distinct sets of
structural arrangements or institutions, rather than simply through
abstract economic processes. Markets in the real world are
institutions - not spontaneous, unorganized activities.(14) Williamson
refers to two contrasting institutional forms: market and hierarchy.
For Olson, public goods cannot be provided in optimal amounts through
a market, for free riders will not pay their share of the costs. Only
authoritative structures and processes make it possible for costs to
be efficiently recouped from the users of public goods. For
Williamson, specific assets are also more efficiently organized and
managed authoritatively, through hierarchy. In his own work, of
course, the authoritative unit in question is not the state but the
firm. Such authoritative allocation is done through long-term
contracting (keeping the same collaborators) and decision making by
managerial fiat (integration, merger, cartellization, etc.) rather
than through the short-term, "recurrent contracting" of marketable,
easily substitutable, nonspecific assets. Whereas efficient regulation
of the market for the latter merely requires post hoc legal
adjudication through contract law and the courts, the former requires
increasing degrees of proactive institutionalized governance in the
allocation of resources and values. Different kinds of structural
integration - distinct mixes of market and hierarchy - may be judged
to suit particular mixes of specific and nonspecific assets.
The sort of legitimate, holistic political authority characteristic of
the traditional state reflects either an institutionalized commitment
to provide public goods efficiently, or the presence of extensive
specific assets, or both. The latter are mainly embodied in people
(human capital), immobile factors of capital such as infrastructure,
and the promotion of certain types of large-scale integrated
industrial processes. Of course, traditional conceptions of the state
also extend to other specific factors, especially national defense
(the capacity to wage war being particularly public and specific);
promotion of a common culture, national ideology, or set of
constitutional norms; preservation of collective unity in the face of
the "other"; and maintenance of a widely acceptable and functioning
legal system. These sorts of tasks and activities also would normally
be more efficiently carried out through predominantly hierarchical
institutions (a classic conundrum of decision making in a liberal
democracy).(15) However, in the real world, most economic and
political processes involve either a mix of market and hierarchy or
goods having mixed public and private characteristics. In this
context, it is important to remember that politics involves not only
constructing relatively efficient structures within which to provide
public goods and minimize transaction costs in the maintenance of
specific assets but also managing the overarching system within which
both types of goods and assets are produced and exchanged - this
system itself constituting a public good.
The historical evolution of political economies of scale
Such complex political-economic structures develop mainly through a
continuing process of bricolage or tinkering. Occasional paradigmatic
change does occur however when the requirements for providing (at its
simplest) both public goods and private goods in some workable
combination increase beyond the capacity of the institutional
structure to reconcile the two over the medium-to-long term. Such
major transformations are reflected in historical changes from
small-scale to large-scale societies. At one end of the spectrum, the
smaller the scale of an economy/society the more the public and
private are likely to overlap and coincide. Such mechanisms remain
relatively undifferentiated. The outstanding exemplar of how this
management system works can be seen in the role of kinship as studied
by anthropologists. Subsistence and early surplus production and
reproduction in small, relatively isolated communities usually involve
the emergence of a single, relatively homogeneous institutional
structure in which economic and political power are part of the same
more or less hierarchical system. It could even be suggested that by
basing society, for political and economic reasons around an extended
kinship structure, the range of what Fred Hirsch calls "positional
goods" (those goods that can be used only by a small number of people,
such as those standing on the top rung of a ladder or, in this case,
occupying a patriarchally determined position of power in a kinship
hierarchy) might therefore also be constrained and controlled in one
virtual natural monopoly of power.(16)
In contrast, however, the larger and more complex the structural scale
of a society/economy, the more assets and goods become differentiated.
The scale of existing social and political arrangements for the
stabilization and regulation of production, exchange, and consumption
- i.e., for the provision of public goods - is likely to be suboptimal
for the scale of public goods required and of specific assets
involved. Furthermore, some former public goods and specific assets
may be more readily and efficiently provided by the market, given the
greater range of factors of production available and the greater
number of participants in larger-scale markets. A new structural
settlement reflecting altered optimal political economies of scale
must therefore be found - what Spruyt calls "institutional
selection."(17)
Sociological theorists have long identified structural differentiation
as the core process of the development of societies.(18) Analogous
processes of political and economic differentiation are the key to
understanding how political economies of scale shift over time. In
agricultural societies, early states exhibited analogous structural
characteristics whether they emerged as the result of predation by a
single group or through the development of a more complex division of
labor.(19) Later, modern states, whatever their specific historical
origins, developed not only from the need to provide appropriate
levels of new and more broadly defined public goods in material terms
but also in order to create appropriate conditions for stabilizing and
promoting rapidly expanding market processes.(20) Establishing and
maintaining a stable and ordered playing field on which both private
and public goods could be provided efficiently came increasingly to be
seen as a public good in itself, in contrast to the quasi-private
predatory state that had first succeeded feudalism.(21) These
structural innovations enabled postfeudal societies to survive and
compete in the fierce military and economic struggles of that
period.(22)
The central process in the development of the modern capitalist
nation-state thus involved a complex and interdependent shift of both
political and economic structures to a broader scale.(23) Interaction
between states - economic competition and military conflict - was
crucial to this convergence.(24) To foster the expanding provision of
private goods, the development of national markets and production
processes was promoted by otherwise quite different types of states.
States in general, which previously had fulfilled only limited
socioeconomic functions, thereby came to undertake an increasing range
of core social, economic, and political functions - notably
stabilization of the social order, promotion of a national culture,
the establishment and defense of more clearly defined territorial
borders, increased regulation of economic activities, and the
development and maintenance of a legal system to enforce contracts and
private property. Although the expansion of these general functions of
the state was accompanied by growing demands for constitutional and
democratic government to define and secure those functions,
hierarchical and authoritarian bureaucracies were set up at the same
time to carry them out. In addition, states took on more specific
public goods functions such as public works, promotion and protection
of particular industries, development of monopolies, provision of
infrastructure, and the like. The evolution of these functions was
highly uneven both within and across state borders.
Only with the coming of the so-called second industrial revolution in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did the process
shift reach a more comprehensive stage of convergence. The second
industrial revolution comprised the development of advanced forms of
mass production, the increasing application of science and scientific
methods to both production processes and management techniques, and
the expansion of economies of scale - often called Fordism, or, in
Alfred Chandler's terms, the modern industrial enterprise. This era is
generally acknowledged to have taken off with the growth of railroad
systems from small lines to national networks. In the United States,
oligopolistic firms emerged as the core of the new heavy industrial
capital as America in the 1880s became the world's largest industrial
producer. In other newly industrializing countries the state took a
more direct role in tying economy and society together. This process
occurred not only in Europe and later Japan but to a greater or lesser
extent throughout the world as emerging states sought to
industrialize. First the steel, then the chemical, automobile, and
other large-scale heavy industries grew up, generally in highly
favorable political and bureaucratic conditions. Central to this
process was the growth of large-scale finance capital, whether under
the wing of the state or in a more freewheeling liberal environment,
as in the United States.(25) Along with these developments came
national-scale processing and packing industries, integrated
distribution systems, and the emergence of chains of large retail
firms. The rise of the modern corporation and "scientific management"
was part and parcel of this era.(26) Despite the different absolute
sizes of such new industrial states, the combination of internal
hierarchization and external competition gave them a certain unitary
character and relative equality compared with the patchwork of
political and economic units that had characterized late feudalism and
even early industrial capitalism.
State promotion of industrial development further unified the
nation-state - despite the growing conflict between democratic and
authoritarian forms of government and struggles among emerging
economic classes - and led to an intensification of national economic
competition. In the United States, with its huge domestic market, this
involved relatively less direct state intervention, whereas in Germany
and Japan state promotion was critical to large-scale capital. Max
Weber's conception of modern social organization (the development of
large-scale political and economic bureaucracies) as well as Karl
Marx's belief that the end result would be a top-heavy monopoly
capitalism shored up by the state were essentially second industrial
revolution theories.(27) Ironically, Britain's decline was
inextricably intertwined with its inability to develop much beyond the
structures of a first industrial revolution state.(28) The subsequent
development of the second industrial revolution state can be traced
forward to the intense national competition of the 1930s, most
strikingly embodied in the rise of fascism and Stalinism, but also
reflected in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the United
States. This worldwide scale shift led to what Karl Polanyi called the
great transformation: namely, a change from the first industrial
revolution attempt to establish a global self-regulating market, to
the corporatist, social democratic, national welfare state, which
crystallized in the 1930s and became dominant after World War II.(29)
Second industrial revolution states thus converged on a more or less
centralized model concerned with a growing range of policy functions:
promoting and maintaining large-scale mass production industries;
providing the requisite levels of regulation and demand management to
ensure, in particular, that their extensive specific assets would not
be undermined by economic downturns; and creating not only mass
markets but also a disciplined work force to keep the factories
humming.
The above account of the convergence of the political and economic
structures of the second industrial revolution is, of course, a
schematic oversimplification. One obvious problem is that it does not
take much notice of the tensions and contradictions within the
political-economic structures of the second industrial revolution. A
more critical problem, however, is that this account cannot anticipate
those new developments that would create pressures for fundamental
structural change beyond the second industrial revolution model. On
the endogenous level, the principal economic pressures for change
stemmed from the competition among different fractions of capital and
the increasing differentiation of production and consumption
processes. The "competition of capitals" did not so much concern
competition between rival capitalist firms as that between sectors
rooted in different asset structures, producing and marketing
different types of goods. Large-scale production sectors characterized
by high levels of specific assets, especially natural monopolies and
sectors producing capital goods, were best placed to benefit
structurally from state promotion and procurement and from centralized
structures of public and/or private finance capital. Small-scale
sectors characterized primarily by nonspecific assets were
structurally oriented toward other small producers and final consumers
and found their relationships with the state or with high finance
nonexistent, irrelevant, or threatening to their markets. The United
States was probably the only country that, because of the size of its
home market, could institutionally cater to both sectors. In most
countries, however, tension between these economic sectors was
interwoven with political and ideological clashes across a range of
social and economic groups supporting different forms and combinations
of authoritarianism and democracy. The internal control span of the
state qua hierarchy was continually under challenge, even in the most
outwardly authoritarian of states, and failures of hierarchy to work
efficiently were commonplace.
Even more important in the long run was the interaction of these
endogenous tensions with exogenous ones. On the exogenous level, the
principal forms of tension between different types of goods or asset
structures were those between the nationalization of warfare (and the
production system necessary for modern total war), on the one hand,
and the gradual but uneven internationalization of civilian production
and exchange, on the other. Until World War I, the dynamics of
economic competition and those of military rivalry were not so
different with regard to many key issues, such as the development of
dual-use railway systems, steel industries, and shipbuilding
industries. Additionally, the nation-state constituted the predominant
(although not the only) organizational unit for both types of
activities. The international economic instability of the 1920s and
the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, represented a fundamental
loss of control by states, both authoritarian and liberal, over
international economic processes.(30) The immediate result was, of
course, the attempt to reassert previously existing forms of control
in more intensified forms - more potent authoritarian autarchic
empires and the withdrawal of even liberal states behind trade
barriers - as all major states tried to recapture hierarchical control
over their economic processes.
Thus the story of capitalism in the second industrial revolution was
one of uneven internationalization if not yet of globalization.
Britain's relatively free-trading empire, increasingly reinforced (and
later replaced) by America's open door, created productive financial
and trade links that drew second industrial revolution states out of
their national shell and into an international web of linkages.(31)
Despite the growth of autarchic empires in the 1920s and 1930s, the
internationalists who prevailed within the Roosevelt administration by
the mid-to-late 1930s and who later dominated wartime planning for the
peace aimed to establish an arm's-length, increasingly multinational,
free-trading system after the war.(32) Postwar U.S. hegemony,
furthermore, was itself based on quasi-multilateral international
economics and quasi-integrated defense systems; these were not
entirely dependent upon the continuance of U.S. military dominance for
their survival. Free trade outlived the recession and new
protectionism of the 1970s, while French President Charles de Gaulle's
attempt in the 1960s to revive the notion of purely national,
nonintegrated defense petered out even before his exit from power.(33)
Thus, although political consciousness remained overwhelmingly
national, both security and economic structures - especially the
latter - became increasingly internationalized. The later stages of
the second industrial revolution itself - the so-called long boom -
saw the beginnings of the decay of the second industrial revolution
state. By the time John Kenneth Galbraith had published The New
Industrial State in 1967, the relatively monolithic political-economic
"technostructure" that he depicted was already out of date.(34)
Existing contradictions interacted with a new phase of scale shift.
Many of what constituted public goods in the second industrial
revolution (national-level strategic industries and regulatory and
welfare systems, for example) increasingly are integrated into a wider
world marketplace. The third industrial revolution - characterized by
the intensive application of information and communications
technology, flexible production systems and organizational structures,
market segmentation, and globalization - also has profoundly altered
the way that the structure of goods and assets themselves is shaped.
Differentiation within production processes and through the
segmentation of markets have contributed to this newer shift, as has
the globalization of finance, which increasingly has divorced finance
capital from the state. Institutional capacities for political
control, stabilization, regulation, promotion, and facilitation of
economic activities have therefore become increasingly fragmented.
From international regimes to cross-cutting local pressures, new
circuits of power are emerging.(35) These circuits of power result, in
effect, both from new forms of collective action and from a revival of
old forms in response to the changing structural context. They have
not merely challenged the state but instead overlap with it, cut
across it, and fragment it. Forms of collective action tailored to the
nation-state have proved increasingly ineffective - leading at first
to political polarization and then to attempts to reinvent
government.(36)
Globalization and the changing public goods problem
The most important dimension of convergence between political and
economic structures in the second industrial revolution state was the
dominance of national-level organizational apparatuses in each sphere
and the development of complex organized interfaces cutting across and
linking the two spheres. Among these interfaces was corporatism, both
state and societal.(37) Expanding national bureaucracies continually
took on new social and economic tasks, while national capital found
that national markets (and the national state) provided a congenial
and appropriate framework around which to organize. International
capital, too, looked to the home state for promotion and protection
while seeking to control and manipulate host states. Political
consciousness and growing demands from below emerged and consolidated
in practice within the arena of the national constitutional state,
even when opposing that state in principle. It is still difficult
today to conceive of working democratic systems other than through the
lens of the nation-state. Even Marxist internationalism, especially
under the revisionist influence of Lenin, became increasingly focused
on taking power by appropriating the apparatuses of the state.(38)
Public goods were perceived by all interested parties as
national-level phenomena, even when they were externalized through
imperial expansion. Nevertheless, a fundamental transformation has
taken place in the structure of public goods in today's global era,
making both their pursuit and their provision through the nation-state
more problematic.
Those traditionally conceived public goods have been primarily of
three kinds.(39) The first involves the establishment of a workable
market framework for the ongoing operation of the system as a whole -
regulatory public goods. These include the establishment and
protection of private (and public) property rights, a stable currency,
the abolition of internal barriers to production and exchange,
standardization of weights and measures, a legal system to sanction
and enforce contracts and to adjudicate disputes, a more specific
regulatory system to stabilize and coordinate economic activities, a
system of trade protection, and other systems that could be mobilized
to counteract system-threatening market failures (such as lender of
last resort facilities and emergency powers provisions). The second
involves specific state-controlled or state-sponsored activities of
production and distribution - productive/distributive public goods.
Among these are full or partial public ownership of certain
industries, direct or indirect provision of infrastructure and public
services, direct or indirect involvement in finance capital, and
myriad public subsidies. The third type of public goods are
redistributive public goods, especially those resulting from the
expanding political and public policy demands of emerging social
classes, economic interests, and political parties and the responses
of state actors to those demands. Redistributive goods include health
and welfare services, employment policies, corporatist bargaining
processes (although these often have had a significant regulatory
function as well), and environmental protection - indeed, the main
apparatus of the national welfare state. The provision of all three
kinds of public goods in second industrial revolution states was
dependent on the interweaving of large-scale specific assets between
bureaucratic structures and structures of capital.
In a globalizing world, however, national states have difficulty
supplying or fostering all of these categories of public good.
Regulatory public goods are an obvious case. In a world of relatively
open trade, financial deregulation, and the increasing impact of
information technology, property rights are more difficult for the
state to establish and maintain. For example, cross-border industrial
espionage, counterfeiting of products, copyright violations, and the
like have made the multilateral protection of intellectual property
rights a focal point of international disputes and a bone of
contention in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (now the World Trade Organization). International capital
flows and the proliferation of offshore financial centers and tax
havens have rendered firm ownership and firms' ability internally to
allocate resources through transfer pricing and the like increasingly
opaque to national tax and regulatory authorities. Traditional forms
of trade protectionism, too, are both easily bypassed and
counterproductive.(40) Currency exchange rates and interest rates are
increasingly set in globalizing marketplaces, and governments attempt
to manipulate them at their peril.(41) Legal rules are increasingly
easy to evade, and attempts to extend the legal reach of the national
state through the development of extraterritoriality are ineffective
and hotly disputed. Finally, the ability of firms, market actors, and
competing parts of the national state apparatus itself to defend and
expand their economic and political turf through activities such as
transnational policy networking and regulatory arbitrage - the
capacity of industrial and financial sectors to whipsaw the state
apparatus by pushing state agencies into a process of competitive
deregulation or what economists call competition in laxity - has both
undermined the control span of the state from without and fragmented
it from within.(42)
Furthermore, real or potential inefficiencies in the provision of
regulatory public goods have much wider ramifications than merely for
the provision of public goods per se, because they constitute the
framework, the playing field, within which private goods as well as
other public goods are provided in the wider economy and society. In
other words, actors seeking to pursue regulatory public goods today
are likely to see traditional state-based forms of regulation as
neither efficient nor sufficient in a globalizing world. Perhaps a
more familiar theme in the public goods literature, however, has been
the impact of globalization on the capacity of the state to provide
productive/distributive public goods. The most visible aspect of this
impact has been the crisis of public ownership of strategic industries
and the wave of privatization that have characterized the 1980s and
1990s. Once again, both political and economic scale factors are at
work. At one level, such industries are no longer perceived as
strategic. Steel, chemicals, railroad, motor vehicles, aircraft,
shipbuilding, and basic energy industries were once seen as a core set
of industries over which national control was necessary for both
economic strength in peacetime and survival in wartime. Today,
internationalization of the asset structure of these industries, of
the goods they produce, and of the markets for those products - with
foreign investment going in both directions - has caused the
internationalization of even high-technology industries producing
components for weaponry.(43)
At the same time, the state is seen as structurally inappropriate for
the task of directly providing productive/distributive goods. Public
ownership of industry is thought so inherently inefficient
economically (the "lame duck syndrome") as to render ineffectual its
once-perceived benefits of permitting national planning, providing
employment, or enlarging social justice. Third World countries
increasingly reject delinkage and import substitution
industrialization and embrace export promotion industrialization,
thereby imbricating their economies even more closely with the global
economy.(44) Even where public ownership has been expanded, its
ostensible rationale has been as part of a drive for international
competitiveness and not an exercise in national exclusiveness, as in
France in the early 1980s.(45) The same can be said for more
traditional forms of industrial policy, such as state subsidies to
industry, public procurement of nationally produced goods and
services, or trade protectionism. Monetarist and private sector
supply-side economists deny that the state has ever been in a position
to intervene in these matters in an economically efficient way and
argue further that the possibility of playing such a role at all in
today's globalized world has utterly evaporated in the era of
"quicksilver capital" flowing across borders.(46) However, even social
liberal and other relatively interventionist economists nowadays
regard the battle to retain the homogeneity of the national economy to
be all but lost and argue that states are condemned to tinkering
around the edges.(47)
The outer limits of effective action by the state in this environment
are usually seen to comprise its capacity to promote a relatively
favorable investment climate for transnational capital - i.e., by
providing an increasingly circumscribed range of goods that retain a
national-scale (of subnational-scale) public character or of a
particular type of still-specific assets described as immobile factors
of capital.(48) Such potentially manipulable factors include: human
capital (the skills, experience, education, and training of the work
force); infrastructure (from public transportation to high-technology
information highways); support for a critical mass of research and
development activities; basic public services necessary for a good
quality of life for those working in middle- to high-level positions
in otherwise footloose (transnationally mobile) firms and sectors; and
maintenance of a public policy environment favorable to investment
(and profit making) by such companies, whether domestic or
foreign-owned. I have called this mixture the "competition state."(49)
Finally, of course, globalization has had a severe impact, both direct
and indirect, on the possibility for the state efficiently to provide
redistributive public goods. With regard to labor market policy, for
example, corporatist bargaining and employment policies are everywhere
under pressure - although somewhat unevenly, depending less on the
country than on the sector concerned - in the face of international
pressure for wage restraint and flexible working practices. The
provision of education and training increasingly is taking priority
over direct labor market intervention, worker protection, and incomes
policies.(50) With regard to the welfare state, although the developed
states generally have not been able to reduce the overall weight of
welfare spending in the economy, a highly significant shift from
maintaining free-standing social and public services to merely keeping
up with expanding existing commitments has occurred in many countries.
Unemployment compensation and entitlement programs have ballooned as a
consequence of industrial downsizing, increasing inequalities of
wealth, homelessness, and the aging of the population in industrial
societies, thereby tending to crowd out funding for other services.
Finally, the most salient new sector of redistributive public goods,
environmental protection, is especially transnational in character;
pollution and the depletion of natural resources do not respect
borders.(51) Therefore, in all three of the principal categories of
second industrial revolution public goods, globalization has undercut
the policy capacity of the national state in all but a few areas.
This view is contested, of course - for example by Geoffrey Garrett
and Peter Lange. They argue that nationally autonomous corporatist
policy approaches have been remarkably resilient in terms of
developing labor-friendly supply-side alternatives for increasing
international competitiveness, even though macroeconomic policy
autonomy has been severely curtailed. This argument is not necessarily
wholly incompatible with the approach taken here, especially in the
light of Robert Reich's distinction between mobile and immobile
factors of capital and the greater capacity of the state to manipulate
the latter; indeed, elsewhere I provisionally explore supply-side
alternatives for the left in the context of the competition state.
Nevertheless, I believe Garrett and Lange's analysis does not fully
capture the ongoing knock-on effects of financial globalization on
other sectors - for example, in the stuttering cycle of recession and
partial recovery since the October 1987 economic crash, which led to
greater exposure to international constraints of many corporatist
economies.(52)
Scale shift and the third industrial revolution
In addition to the changing scale of public goods, the changing
technological and institutional context in which all goods are
increasingly being produced and exchanged has been central to this
transformation. The third industrial revolution has many
characteristics, but those most relevant to our concern with scale
shift involve five trends in particular, each bound up with the
others. The first is the development of flexible manufacturing systems
and their spread not only to new industries but to older ones as well.
The second is the changing hierarchical form of firms (and
bureaucracies) to what has been called "lean management." The third is
the capacity of decision-making structures to monitor the actions of
all levels of management and of the labor force far more closely
through the use of information technology. The fourth is the
segmentation of markets in a more complex consumer society. Finally,
the third industrial revolution has been profoundly shaped by the
emergence of increasingly autonomous transnational financial markets
and institutions.
The issue of flexible manufacturing systems has been at the heart of
the new comparative and international political economy over the past
decade and a half. Given the huge amount of fixed capital advanced
industrial states had inherited from the various phases of the second
industrial revolution (and Britain from the first), much "creative
destruction" of fixed capital stock would be required before the next
phase of capital investment could take off. The first reaction of the
state, still shaped by the experiences and characterized by the
structures of second industrial revolution bureaucracies, was to
attempt to take industry under its wing again in the traditional way.
But the more open international environment has made such measures
increasingly counterproductive. International competition from
flexible, high-technology economies like Japan and some other newly
industrializing countries (whose governments promoted such
flexibility) seemed to turn decline into a vicious circle.
Flexible production itself requires not an integration but a
differentiation - both of distinct stages of the production process
and of increasingly complex and variable production-line tasks
themselves. Rather than being managed authoritatively through the
hierarchical firm, flexible production is organized through a range of
processes that Williamson would call "recurrent contracting." These
include: increased subcontracting (rather than direct control) of the
manufacturing and supply of peripheral components of the production
process; increasingly autonomous labor and management teams charged
with evolving more efficient ways of carrying out specific tasks (for
example, intrepreneurship and Japanese-style quality circles); and
shortening process and product cycles in both technological and
organizational terms - including "just in time" procurement of parts
supplies and the ability to switch both machines and workers from
product to product and task to task. This structure obviously requires
not merely a workforce that is both flexible and highly trained but
also the latest in high-technology production techniques such as
robots, reprogrammable machine tools, and computerized production
lines.
jum...@my-deja.com
These production facilities require a range of new conditions
to operate efficiently, including such factors as the availability of
greenfield sites - sites away from the decaying fixed capital and
unionized work forces of the second industrial revolution industries,
e.g., in the U.S. Rust Belt - and proximity to other similarly
structured industries. In such locations, cross-fertilization between
the experiences of workers and managers, the development of product
improvements in related fields, and the learning curve of process
innovation can create a virtuous circle or synergy among firms. The
electronics industry is the example, and Silicon Valley the exemplar.
Flexible production, not a respecter of borders, is a crucial element
in internationalizing production and competition. This trend has, of
course, been analyzed at several levels since the late 1970s from
neo-Marxist, center-left, and neoliberal perspectives. The right,
especially in the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher years, spoke
much the same language about the need for flexible structures;
however, certain other groups within the right rejected this analysis
in favor of a more active, pro-business industrial policy approach. In
the ongoing academic debate, John Zysman showed as early as 1977 how
the attempt by the French government in the 1970s to promote the
development of the electronics industry (through the Plan calcul) just
as in earlier years it successfully had promoted the oil and steel
industries, failed because of the differing asset structures of the
industries involved.(53) Several authors, including Reich, argued in
the early 1980s that restructuring the U.S. economy would require a
thoroughgoing change not only in the organization of industry and of
the state but also in the economic and political culture of the
country.(54) Zysman and Laura D'Andrea Tyson examined challenges to
U.S. competitiveness in a range of sectors and diagnosed a lack of
flexibility as the main problem; they suggested that a proactive state
could manipulate competitive advantages possessed by different sectors
to facilitate the necessary adjustment processes.(55) Michael Piore
and Charles Sabel examined the experience of "craft" production in
Europe and argued that the flexible specialization of those industries
also had lessons for U.S. adjustment.(56) These approaches also were
reflected in sociological analysis, partly influenced by sea changes
in neo- and post-Marxism, and in economic analysis as well, from the
more radical regulation school in France to the new institutional
economics of Williamson and others in the United States. What have
been called post-Fordist social and economic structures have been
examined extensively across the social sciences.(57)
Closely linked with the development of more flexible production
processes was the structure of firms as such. In addition to
experimenting with new forms of differentiation outside the core firm
(as with subcontracting), managerial theorists focused on the
"flexibilization" of the bureaucratic layers of the firms themselves.
This did not merely require firing layers of cadres - although
downsizing has become increasingly important - but it also required
altering the consciousness of managers themselves. Although management
literature has always been filled with exhortations to such qualities
as excellence, the emphasis in the scientific management era of the
second industrial revolution focused on the efficient division of
responsibilities among individuals who were highly skilled at discrete
tasks. In the third industrial revolution, in contrast, two sorts of
individual became the totems of the new excellence: brilliant
innovator/managers such as Steven Jobs or William Gates, who could
singlehandedly envision and construct new processes and products from
outside the established structures (the entrepreneurs), and the
leaders of autonomous teams within large but more flexible
organizations who could change the direction of those institutions
(so-called intrepreneurs).
Even IBM, which had long attempted to incorporate new practices
piecemeal without having to relinquish the specific asset base it had
built (its second industrial revolution-style managerial hierarchy and
its secure and reliable workforce), eventually had to adjust. It did
so both by dramatically increasing subcontracting globally and locally
and, more recently, by extensive downsizing. What had previously been
built up as specific assets, from a skilled and loyal workforce to
large-scale mass production facilities - and had been prized as such -
increasingly are being destroyed or transformed into nonspecific
assets that can be exchanged in more open and extensive world markets.
The restructuring of firms and production processes in the developed
world and the Third World alike has been dramatic, and such firms are
psychologically as well as materially better prepared and more eager
to participate.
At the heart of the flexibilization of both production processes and
firms themselves has been the explosive development of information
technology. Olson argued that a key factor making collective action
difficult in large groups was the inability of such groups to monitor
the behavior of members who might be tempted to ride free. Electronic
computer and communications technology has of course transformed this
problem. The ability to coordinate centralized and therefore coherent
strategic decision making with decentralized and therefore innovative
operational decision making is the principal predicament faced in
experimenting with the new organizational structure of the firm. The
most efficient relationship between market and hierarchy varies from
sector to sector, technology to technology, and product to product.
Today, workers and lower-level managers increasingly are left on their
own to learn how to carry out their tasks more productively and
competitively; however, at the same time, financial managers are
watching ever more effectively from a distance through complex and
flexible information networks, using a panoply of financial controls
and performance indicators.(58) This capacity to monitor ostensibly
autonomous activity bridges the gap between public and private goods
within the firm, enabling central decision makers to harness the
initiatives of peripheral managers and workers to the wider aims of
the more amorphous organization. This monitoring capability also leaps
national borders and brings firms, markets, and consumers into a
single, global production process in an increasing number of sectors.
But these aspects of the third industrial revolution - flexibilization
of production, firm structure, and monitoring - are only part of the
picture. They represent the supply side of the equation. The demand
side involves the development of ever more complex consumer societies
and the resulting segmentation of markets. This reflects the
convergence of two developments. The first is the technological
capacity to produce flexibly - the capacity of business to produce at
the appropriate scale for a much more highly differentiated structure
of demand, however multilayered. The second, however, is the
increasing differentiation of the class system itself in advanced
capitalist societies. In the second industrial revolution, workers in
particular but the middle classes too, could mainly expect to buy
fairly standardized products - sometimes referred to as the
one-size-fits-all approach. Growing factories technologically were
capable of - and often limited to - long-run, large-scale production;
at the same time, social mobility meant that first-time buyers were
glad to get whatever products were available. However, by the end of
the 1960s, first-time markets were becoming saturated in the advanced
capitalist world. Much of the long boom had involved burgeoning
first-time markets for such products as "white goods" (refrigerators,
washing machines), cars, and television sets. Customers making a
subsequent purchase, however, demanded higher specifications and
greater choice. Differentiating demand and flexible supply thus
converged on market segmentation, producing a wider range of
variations on a particular product or set of products, with each
variation targeted to a particular subset of consumers. This process
also created consumer demand for foreign-produced goods and forced
firms to internationalize. These pressures now apply to the provision
of public goods by governments, as well. The final characteristic of
the third industrial revolution is the growing significance of global
financial markets.(59) The abstract or "dematerialized" character of
finance in a world of information technology and cutting-edge
communications systems makes trading in financial instruments
virtually instantaneous. Even in the 1930s, Keynes believed that
financial markets were too easy to play, too readily divorced from the
real economy, for socially and economically necessary production to
occur; they tended to constitute a giant casino. In the period since
the 1950s - and especially since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods
system - finance has once again become globalized, with newly
deregulated markets increasingly absorbing money from the real
economy.(60)
Indeed, finance embodies each of the main characteristics of the third
industrial revolution described above. In product terms, it has become
the exemplar of a flexible industry, trading in notional and
infinitely variable financial instruments. Financial innovation has
been rapid and far-reaching, affecting all parts of the financial
services industry and shaping every industrial sector.(61)
Furthermore, product innovation has been matched by process
innovation. Traders and other financial market actors and firms are
expected to act like entrepreneurs (or intrepreneurs) as a matter of
course. Financial globalization has been virtually synonymous with the
rapid development of electronic computer and communications
technology.(62) The ownership and transfer of shares and other
financial instruments increasingly are recorded only on computer
files, without the exchange of paper certificates - what the French
call dematerialization - although written documentation can always be
provided for financial controllers, auditors, or regulators (in
principle, at least although in practice fraud adapts quickly). With
increasing globalization of production and trade, market demand for
financial services products continually is segmenting, too.
Probably the most important consequence of the globalization of
financial markets is their increasing structural hegemony in wider
economic and political structures and processes. In a more open world,
financial balances and flows increasingly are dominant - with the
volume of financial transactions variously estimated as totaling
twenty to forty times the value of merchandise trade. This gap is
growing rapidly as private international capital markets expand.
Exchange rates and interest rates, as essential to business decision
making as to public policymaking, increasingly are determined by world
market conditions. In addition, as trade and production structures in
the third industrial revolution go through the kinds of changes
outlined earlier, they will be increasingly coordinated through the
application of complex financial controls, accounting techniques, and
financial performance indicators (because nonfinancial performance is
complex and difficult to measure in a globalizing world). These
strictures are applicable to a range of organizations, including
government bureaucracies. Financial markets epitomize, in Williamson's
terms, the structural ascendancy of almost purely nonspecific assets
over specific assets in the global economy, pushing and pulling other
economic sectors and activities unevenly into the global arena.
Collective action and the residual state
The economic and political world of the third industrial revolution
revolves around a central paradox. On the one hand, globalization
would seem to entail the shift of the world economy to an even larger
structural scale. This perception of globalization was what led
observers a decade or two ago to misinterpret the significance of
multinational corporations, which were seen as involving the worldwide
integration of specific assets.(63) Of course, many such firms, and
some problems like environmental pollution, do resemble this model of
an upward shift in scale, potentially requiring transnational-level
institutions for effective regulation. However, economic restructuring
has involved a more complex process, altering the composition of
public goods and specific assets and even involving the privatization
and marketization of the political-economic structure itself. These
processes lead in turn to the whipsawing of states between structural
pressures and organizational levels that they cannot control in a
complex, circular fashion. Thus economic globalization contributes not
to the supersession of the state by a homogeneous world order as such
but to the differentiation of the existing national and international
political orders, as well. Indeed, globalization leads to a growing
disjunction between the democratic, constitutional, and social
aspirations of people - which continue to be shaped by and understood
through the framework of the territorial state - and the increasingly
problematic potential for collective action through state political
processes. Certain possibilities for collective action through
multilateral regimes may increase, but these operate at at least one
remove from democratic accountability.(64) Indeed, the study of
international regimes is expanding beyond intergovernmental
institutions or public entities per se toward "private regimes" as
critical regulatory mechanisms.(65) New nodes of private and
quasi-public economic power are crystallizing that, in their own
partial domains, are in effect more sovereign than the state.
Despite these changes, of course, states retain certain vital
political and economic functions at both the domestic and
international levels. Indeed, some of these have paradoxically been
strengthened by globalization. But the character of these functions is
changing. New collective action problems undermine the constraining
character of previously dominant political and economic games. As a
result, policymakers everywhere are seeking to restructure the state
so that it can play new roles in the future. While the state retains a
crucial role in the political-economic matrix of a globalizing world,
however, its holistic and overarching character - as reflected in
Aristotle's "most sovereign and inclusive association" or Oakeshott's
"civil association" - may be increasingly compromised. The state today
is a potentially unstable mix of civil association and enterprise
association - of constitutional state, pressure group, and firm - with
state actors, no longer so autonomous, feeling their way uneasily in
an unfamiliar world.(66) At this point, I will briefly consider some
of the issues facing this "residual state."
The structural coherence, power, and autonomy of states themselves
clearly have become problematic in recent years. Over the past four
centuries, the state has become the repository of probably the most
important dimension of human society - social identity, and in this
case, national identity. This sense of national identity has been
reinforced both by nationalism and by the spread of democratic
institutions and processes. Indeed, liberal democracy has constituted
the most important linkage or interface between social identity on the
one hand and state structures and processes on the other. Therefore,
the first main bulwark of the state, even in a globalizing world, is
found in the deep social roots of gemeinschaftlich national identity
that have developed through the modern nation-state. Such identities
are bound to decline to some extent, both through the erosion of the
national public sphere from above and from the reassertion of substate
ethnic, cultural, and religious identities from below. Thus the decay
of the cultural underpinnings of the state - of rain-or-shine loyalty
- will be uneven, and in economically stronger states this decay is
likely to proceed more slowly than in weaker ones.(67)
This will be particularly true if the potential capacity of the more
developed states to provide infrastructure, education systems,
workforce skills, and quality-of-life amenities (usually classed among
the immobile factors of capital) to attract mobile, footloose capital
of a highly sophisticated kind is effectively mobilized.(68) On the
one hand, the ability of states to control development planning, to
collect and use their own tax revenues, to build infrastructure, to
run education and training systems, and to enforce law and order gives
actors continuing to work through the state a capacity to influence
the provision of immobile factors of capital in many highly
significant ways. If Europe, Japan, and the United States along with
perhaps some others are better able to provide these advanced
facilities, then gemeinschaftlich loyalty in those states may recede
more slowly or even stabilize, maintaining the civil-associational
character of the state even as many of its narrower functions are
eroded. On the other hand, mobile international capital may well
destabilize less-favored states, whose already fragile governmental
systems will be torn by groups attempting to recast those
gemeinschaftlich bonds through claims for the ascendancy of religious,
ethnic, or other grass-roots loyalties. The extent to which richer
states are able to avoid such destabilization in the long run remains
problematic, however.
State-based collective action continues to have a major role to play
in the provision of certain crucial types of public goods and in the
management of a range of significant specific assets, even if it must
do so in a context where the authoritative power of the state as a
whole is weaker and more circumscribed than it has been in the past.
But rather than the state being directly responsible for market
outcomes that guarantee the welfare of its citizens, the main focus of
this competition state in the world - partly analogous to the
experience of state governments in the United States - is the
proactive promotion of economic activities, whether at home or abroad,
that will make firms and sectors located within the territory of the
state competitive in international markets.(69) The state itself
becomes an agent for the commodification of the collective, situated
in a wider, market-dominated playing field. In David Andrews's terms,
the competition state will increasingly "cheat" or ride free on
opportunities created by autonomous transnational market structures
and other public goods provided not by other states or the states
system but by increasingly autonomous and private transnational
structures, such as financial markets.(70) The state is thus caught in
a bind in which maintaining a balance between its civil-association
functions and its enterprise-association functions will become
increasingly problematic.
In this new context, the logic of collective action is becoming a
heterogeneous, multilayered logic, derived not from one particular
core structure, such as the state, but from the structural complexity
embedded in the global arena. Globalization does not mean that the
international system is any less structurally anarchic; it merely
changes the structural composition of that anarchy from one made up of
relations between sovereign states to one made up of relations between
functionally differentiated spheres of economic activity, on the one
hand, and the institutional structures proliferating in an ad hoc
fashion to fill the power void, on the other.(71) Different economic
activities - differentiated by their comparative goods/assets
structures - increasingly need to be regulated through distinct sets
of institutions at different levels organized at different optimal
scales. Such institutions, of course, overlap and interact in complex
ways, but they no longer sufficiently coincide on a single optimal
scale in such a way that they could be efficiently integrated into a
multitask hierarchy like the nation-state. Some are essentially
private market structures and regimes, some are still public
intergovernmental structures, and some are mixed public - private.
The paths taken in the future in terms of both democratic
accountability and political legitimacy will be crucial for the
reshaping of the logic of collective action, especially where the
state is no longer capable of being an effective channel for
democratic demands. What sort of complex overall pattern of conflict
and stability, competition and cooperation, will emerge from this
process - in particular, whether the state will, despite its changing
roles, remain a key element in a stabilizing, plurilateral web of
levels and institutions or whether its decay will exacerbate a
long-term trend toward greater instability - is not yet clear. We are
only now in the first stages of a complex, worldwide evolutionary
process of institutional selection.(72)
Conclusions: a framework for future research
In the course of this analysis, I have examined some of the
consequences that derive from my basic argument that the more
economies of scale of dominant goods and assets diverge from the
structural scale of the national state - and the more that those
divergences feed back into each other in complex ways - then the more
that the authority, legitimacy, policymaking capacity, and
policy-implementing effectiveness of the state will be eroded and
undermined both without and within. At this point, I will present a
number of more specific hypotheses derived from this basic problematic
that might form the core of a wider research agenda in this area.
These hypotheses concern the impact of the increasing differentiation
of goods and asset structures on the state and other cross-cutting
structured fields of action in a globalizing world.
Hypothesis 1
Developments in the production, exchange, and/or use of private goods
and nonspecific assets will more and more be shaped and determined
primarily by transnational or global factors and trends. While the
paradigmatic case is finance, an increasing range of substitutable
commodities produced through easily transferred technology come into
this category. A classic example is textiles and footwear;
semiconductors are a more recent one.
Corollary 1a. Such global factors and trends, however, do not only
exist above the nation-state on the international level; they include
direct, cross-cutting linkages between the transnational and the
subnational (local/regional) levels, bypassing the national level. The
regional craft economies studied by Piore and Sabel are criss-crossed
by such linkages. However, some subnational activities that are not
closely linked to the transnational level may fall under corollary 2c.
Corollary 1b. Many - though not all (see corollary 2a) - of what
previously have comprised public goods and specific assets will be
transformed into private goods and nonspecific assets in the wider,
global economic arena. Increasing sectors of the defense industry may
constitute a paradigmatic case.(73)
Hypothesis 2
Developments in economic sectors characterized predominantly by the
production, exchange, or use of public goods and specific assets will
be increasingly shaped and determined by the particular scale of those
goods and assets, whether transnational, national, local, or somewhere
in between.(74) Three categories of public goods/specific assets can
be distinguished, and for each of these I suggest a corollary.
Corollary 2a. With regard to those public goods and specific assets
where economies of scale already or increasingly transcend the scale
of the purely national economy - i.e., where public goods and specific
assets require the integration of production processes and economic
activities at a global or international-regional scale - then
developments in such sectors and activities will be broadly shaped by
global and/or transnational factors and trends. Strategic alliances
among multinational corporations and the provision of environmental
protection often will come into this category.(75)
Corollary 2b. At the same time, however, in those economic sectors and
activities where the scale of the goods/assets structure remains
broadly congruent with the territorial parameters of the national
economy - and where such goods and assets are not in effect
transformed into private goods or nonspecific assets in the wider
global economic space (as in corollary 1b) - then developments will
continue to be determined and shaped primarily by national-level
factors and trends. The provision of terrestrial transportation
infrastructure and public housing still are primarily organized at the
national level, but the range of goods and assets that fall neatly
into this category is shrinking. States of different sizes may of
course have institutional advantages for the stabilization and
regulation of particular sectors of economic activity, those
characterized by optimal scale economies congruent with the
institutional scale of the state. The differentiation of economic
structures in general, however, is likely to mean that such congruence
will be appropriate for only a limited range of activities and not for
integrated, multifunctional or multitask (statelike) institutional
efficiency.
Corollary 2c. As a limited exception to corollary 1a, in some of those
economic activities where the goods/assets structure is locally or
regionally public/specific (here in the sense of subnational rather
than international regions) - rather than organized on a national
scale per se - but where those activities are relatively isolated from
transnational market linkages, developments may be shaped either by
purely local/subnational factors and trends or by national factors and
trends, where such activities are widespread within the national
territory despite not being linked through markets. Subsistence
farming, cooperative organizations, barter circles, and some
ethnically specific activities might come into this category. The
range of activities genuinely delinked from wider markets is small and
shrinking.
Hypothesis 3
The authority, policymaking capacity, and policy-implementation
effectiveness of national governments will be more eroded and
undermined where the goods/assets structure is most globalized or
transnationalized. In these circumstances, the state will be eroded
from without. This is true whether globalization takes the form of
nonspecific assets traded in transnational markets or of integrated
specific assets operating at a transnational scale (see, for example,
hypothesis 1 and corollary 2a above).
Hypothesis 4
The authority, capacity, and effectiveness of the state also will be
increasingly eroded and undermined where the goods/assets structure is
effectively localized - i.e., from within. This process is
particularly significant, of course, where local activities are linked
directly to transnational markets or asset structures (i.e.,
craft-based regions such as Silicon Valley), as fewer and fewer local
activities can exist in isolation from wider market and asset
structures.
Hypothesis 5
The combination of hypothesis 1, corollary 2a, hypothesis 3, and
hypothesis 4 will take the form of a complex, nonlinear process, in
effect whipsawing the state from above and below and magnifying
tendencies toward its structural decay. Thinking globally but acting
locally undermines the state as an arena of collective action.
Hypothesis 6
In contrast to hypothesis 1, corollary 2a, and hypotheses 3, 4, and 5,
the role of the state will be maintained or even increased in sectors
where the goods/assets structure or mix retains or attains a national
or quasi-national scale, as in corollaries 2b and 2c. Once again,
though, this is an increasingly empty category. Nevertheless, the
search for such activities, especially those of a symbolic nature
(e.g., representing gemeinschaft-type aspirations for cultural
homogeneity or the desire to expand national-level subsidiarity in the
European Union), is likely to increase as states seek to retain their
legitimacy.
Hypothesis 7
After a first phase - deriving from the policy inertia that exists in
the early part of a learning curve - of attempting to use traditional
state policy approaches and instruments to control or reverse the
processes posited in hypothesis 1, corollary 2a, and hypotheses 3, 4,
and 5, state actors will attempt to engineer a restructuring of the
state toward the development of a more flexible and "marketized" state
form and policy process in the attempt to regain lost authority,
capacity, and effectiveness (reinventing government).
Hypothesis 8
Where the combined impact of corollaries 2b and 2c and hypotheses 6
and 7, on the one hand, remains in rough balance with the cumulative
impact of hypothesis 1, corollary 2a, and hypotheses 3, 4, and 5, on
the other, the state will take on the character of an enterprise
association. However, although states may lose some of their civil
functions, they may nonetheless be able to retain a vital minimum of
authority, capacity, effectiveness, and legitimacy in significant, if
circumscribed, areas of economic and social life. In these
circumstances, governments may begin to take on the characteristics of
U.S. subnational states.
Hypothesis 9
In contrast, where the cumulative impact of the trends posited in
hypothesis 1, corollary 2a, and hypotheses 3, 4, and 5 is
significantly greater than the combined impact of the trends posited
in corollaries 2b and 2c and hypotheses 6 and 7, the state itself will
be increasingly characterized by a general loss of civil legitimacy.
Under these conditions, government per se will essentially become
privatized, losing much of its public character. The world will be a
neofeudal one, in which overlapping and democratically unaccountable
private regimes, regional arrangements, transnational market
structures, "global cities," nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
quasi-autonomous NGOs, and international quasi-autonomous NGOs, with
rump governments - the extreme form of the residual state-attempting
to ride free on global/local trends for short-term competitive
interests. Collective action will take many forms, and the state will
be perceived as relatively powerless with regard to the pursuit of a
wide range of collective goals.
Hypothesis 10
Finally, under these conditions the state will lose its structural
primacy and autonomy as a unitary actor in the international system.
The anarchy of the international system will no longer be one of
states competing for power but one of neofeudal rivalries and
asymmetric cooperation among a range of interests and collective
agents reflecting differentiated economic activities with diverse
goods/assets structures. These will operate at different institutional
levels, in different issue-areas, and according to rules and payoff
matrices that will vary with the structure of the particular goods and
assets concerned. The interaction among these different forms and
levels of collective action will be complex and nonlinear. The main
question that remains to be asked is whether such a system will tend
toward chaos or toward a certain stability of a plurilateral kind.
I am particularly grateful to Louisa Gosling, formerly of the European
University Institute, for having initiated a dialogue that led to the
elaboration of the theoretical framework explored here. Stephen
Kobrin, Ronen Palan, Geoffrey Underhill, and, of course, John Odell
and two anonymous reviewers for International Organization have
provided particularly valuable comments on the manuscript. Earlier
versions were presented at the annual workshop of the International
Political Economy Group of the British International Studies
Association, University of Sussex, 20 February 1994; the 2d
international conference of the Committee on Viable Constitutionalism,
State University of New York at Albany, 17-20 March 1994; the
conference on Global Politics: Setting Agendas for the Year 2000,
Nottingham Trent University, 25-27 July 1994; and the annual meeting
of the British International Studies Association, University of York,
19-21 December 1994. I thank a wide range of participants in those
meetings for their comments. (1.) P. G. Cerny, "Plurilateralism:
Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post-Cold
War World Order," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22
(Spring 1993), pp. 27-51. (2.) The notion that transnational
interpenetration is not homogeneous is essential to the concept of
complex interdependence as developed in Robert O. Keohane and Joseph
S. Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
The implications of the growing heterogeneity of specific so-called
transnational structures for domestic and international politics are
more thoroughly explored in Susan Strange, States and Markets: An
Introduction to International Political Economy (London and New York:
Pinter and Basil Blackwell, 1988). For a consideration of some
definitional problems with the term "globalization," see Robin Brown,
"The New Realities: Globalization, Culture, and International
Relations," paper presented at the annual meeting of the British
International Studies Association, University of Swansea, Wales, 14-16
December 1992. (3.) Aristotle, Politics, ed. trans. Ernest Barker (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 1. (4.) See Josiah Lee
Auspitz, "Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical
Imagination of Michael Oakeshott," Political Theory 4 (August 1976),
pp. 261-352; and Michael Oakeshott, "On Misunderstanding Human
Conduct: A Reply to my Critics," in ibid., pp. 353-67. (5.) These
issues are examined at more length in P. G. Cerny, The Changing
Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency, and the Future of the
State (London: Sage Publications, 1990), especially chap. 4. (6.) For
an extensive discussion of the concept of structure (and of structural
differentiation), see Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics.
(7.) Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg, L'acteur et le systeme: Les
contraintes de l'action collective (The actor and the system:
Constraints on collective action) (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977).
(8.) On public and private goods, see Mancur Olson, The Logic of
Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
On specific and nonspecific assets, see Oliver E. Williamson, Markets
and Hierarchies (New York: Free Press, 1975); and Oliver E.
Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free
Press, 1985). (9.) For an effective interpretive synthesis, see
Hendrik Spruyt, "Institutional Selection in International Relations:
State Anarchy as Order," International Organization 48 (Autumn 1994),
pp. 527-57. (10.) For the main synthesizing work on economies of scale
(and economies of scope, which we will not deal with separately here),
see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of
Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1990). (11.) Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics, especially
chap. 3. (12.) Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. In between the
two main categories, and deriving from the interaction of these polar
types, stands a range of crucial intermediate categories of semipublic
or quasi-private (mixed) goods. (13.) See Williamson, Markets and
Hierarchies; and Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism.
(14.) Peter A. Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State
Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press;
London: Polity Press, 1986), chap, 1. Compare Cerny, The Changing
Architecture of Politics. (15.) For a classic statement of the
predicament of how stability and effectiveness in democratic systems
may depend on authoritarian institutions and processes, see Harry
Eckstein, "A Theory of Stable Democracy," research monograph no. 10,
Princeton University, 1961, reprinted in Eckstein, Division and
Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1966). See also Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory
(New York: Praeger, 1965). (16.) Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth
(London: Routiedge and Kegan Paul, 1976). (17.) Spruyt, "Institutional
Selection in International Relations." (18.) Peter M. Blau, ed.,
Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (New York and London: Free
Press and Open Books, 1975). (19.) Raymond Cohen and Elman R. Service,
eds., Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution
(Philadelphia, Penn.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1985).
(20.) See especially Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in
Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981), especially chap. 3. Compare
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left
Books, 1974); and Spruyt, "Institutional Selection in International
Relations." (21.) Margaret Levi, "The Predatory Theory of Rule,"
Politics and Society, vol. 10, no. 4, 1981, pp. 431-65. (22.) A
similar analysis, although expressed in less social-theoretical
language, is developed in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), chaps. 1-3. (23.) This complex process -
combining structural differentiation and interdependence (i.e., the
increasing integration of more and more complex structures) - is
essentially the same as Durkheim's conception of how "organic
solidarity" develops out of a more complex division of labor
(replacing "mechanical solidarity"). See Emile Durkheim, The Division
of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1933;
original French edition, 1893). For different interpretations of how
Durkheim should be applied to international relations, see Kenneth
Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1979); John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and
Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,"
World Politics 35 (January 1983), pp. 261-85; Kenneth Waltz,
"Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Reply to My
Critics," in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 322-45; and Cerny,
"Plurilateralism." (24.) See Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers, especially pp. 16-30; and Cerny, The Changing Architecture of
Politics, chaps. 1 and 4. (25.) See P. G. Cerny, "Money and Power: The
American Financial System from Free Banking to Global Competition," in
Grahame Thompson, ed., Markets, vol. 2 of The United States in the
Twentieth Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), pp. 175-213;
and Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and
the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). (26.)
Chandler, Scale and Scope. Also see Robert B. Reich, The Next American
Frontier (New York: Times Books, 1983), part 2. (27.) On Marx's
beliefs, see Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theory and
Methods (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982). For Weber's, see Max Weber,
Economy and Society, 2 vols., eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). (28.) Eric J.
Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969).
Chandler refers to the continuation of "personal capitalism" in
Britain. See his Scale and Scope, part 3. (29.) Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(New York: Rinehart, 1944). (30.) This general loss of control was
perhaps even more significant than the loss of leadership addressed by
Kindleberger (which was a key symptom of the broader phenomenon,
nonetheless). See Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression,
1929-1939 (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1973). (31.) A now
classic analysis of the history of U.S. foreign policy in terms of the
open-door approach can be found in William Appleman Williams, The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2d ed. (New York: Dell, 1972). (32.) On
diplomacy during the Roosevelt administration, see Lloyd C. Gardner,
Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
On the later effects of internationalism, see E. F. Penrose, Economic
Planning for the Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1953). (33.) P. G. Cerny, The Politics of Grandeur.- Ideological
Aspects of de Gaulle's Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), especially chaps. 7-9. (34.) John Kenneth Galbraith, The
New Industrial State (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967). (35.) On
regimes, see Stephen Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). The concept of circuits of
power, and their increasing fragmentation in the contemporary world,
was developed by Foucault. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). (36.) See David Osborne and Ted
Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is
Transforming the Public Sector, from Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City
Hall to the Pentagon (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992). This book
has had an enormous impact on both right and left in the United States
and elsewhere. (37.) The classic statement of the neocorporatist
approach is that in Philippe C. Schmitter, "Still the Century of
Corporatism?" in Frederick Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New
Corporatism (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1974), pp.
85-131. (38.) See V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (1917; reprint, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978); and V.
I. Lenin, State and Revolution (1918; reprint, New York: International
Publishers, 1932). (39.) I am here borrowing freely from Theodore
Lowi's three categories of public policy: distributive, regulatory,
and redistributive. See his works "American Business, Public Policy,
Case Studies, and, Political Theory," World Politics 16 (July 1964),
pp. 677-715, and The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Polity, and the
Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969). (40.) See Pietro
S. Nivola, Regulating Unfair Trade (Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institution, 1993). (41.) P. G. Cerny, "The Dynamics of Financial
Globalization: Technology, Market Structure, and Policy Response,"
Policy Sciences 27 (November 1994), pp. 319-342. (42.) For an analysis
of regulatory arbitrage in the financial sector, see P. G. Cerny, ed.,
Finance and World Politics: Markets, Regimes and States in the
Post-hegemonic Era (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1993),
especially chaps. 3 and 6. (43.) Edward M. Graham and Paul R. Krugman,
Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (Washington, D.C.:
Institute for International Economics, 1989), chap. 5. (44.) See Nigel
Harris, The End of the Third World (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,
1986); and Stephan Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics
of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1990). (45.) P. G. Cerny, "State Capitalism
in France and Britain and the International Economic Order," in P. G.
Cerny and M. A. Schain, eds., Socialism, the State, and Public Policy
in France (London and New York: Pinter and Methuen, 1985), chap. 10.
(46.) Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Quicksilver Capital: How
the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World (New York: Free
Press, 1991). (47.) Probably the best known protagonist in this field
is Reich. See Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing
Ourselves for Twenty-first-Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991).
(48.) Ibid. (49.) Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics,
especially chap. 8. (50.) See Reich, The Work of Nations; and Sally
Hayward, "Labor Markets: A Case for Inclusion in International
Political Economy," paper presented to a colloquium on Technology,
Change, and the Global Political Economy, Nottingham Trent University,
Nottingham, England, 4-6 May 1994. (51.) Angela Liberatore, "Problems
of Transnational Policymaking: Environmental Policy in the European
Community," in P. G. Cerny, ed., The Politics of Transnational
Regulation: Deregulation or Reregulation, special issue of the
European Journal of Political Research 19 (March/April 1991), pp.
281-305. (52.) Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange, "Political Responses
to Interdependence: What's 'Left' for the Left?" International
Organization 45 (Autumn 1991), pp. 539-64. Garrett and Lange's
conclusions may be limited by the fact that they have data only
through 1987. Compare Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics,
especially chap. 8 and the epilogue. See also Roy E. Allen, Financial
Crises and Recession in the Global Economy (Aldershot, England, and
Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1994). (53.) John Zysman, Political
Strategies for Industrial Order.- Market, State, and Industry in
France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). (54.) See
Reich, The Next American Frontier,- and S. M. Miller and Donald
Tomaskovic-Devey, Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the
Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1983). (55.) John Zysman and Laura d'Andrea Tyson, eds.,
American Industry in International Competition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1983). (56.) Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel,
The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York:
Basic Books, 1984). (57.) See in particular Ash Amin, ed.,
Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), especially the
editor's introductory essay. (58.) Dimitris N. Chorofas, The New
Technology of Financial Management: Artificial Intelligence, Expert
Systems, Intelligent Networks, Knowledge Engineering (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1992). (59.) For a more extensive treatment of the
political implications of financial globilization, see Cerny, Finance
and World Politics. (60.) Allen, Financial Crises and Recession in the
Global Economy. (61.) Richard D. Crawford and William W. Sihler, The
Troubled Money Business: The Death of an Old Order and the Rise of a
New Order (New York: HarperBusiness, 1991). (62.) The implications of
technological change in the financial services industry are examined
in Susan Strange, "Finance, Information, and Power," Review of
International Studies 16 (July 1990), pp. 259-74. (63.) A more complex
and sophisticated analysis of multinational corporations - how they
work, how they interact with each other, and how they interact with
states - can be found in John Stopford and Susan Strange (with John S.
Henley), Rival States, Rival Firms: Competition for World Market
Shares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). (64.) On
collective action, see Friedrich Kratochwil and Edward D. Mansfield,
eds., International Organization: A Reader (New York: HarperCollins,
1994). (65.) See, for example, Miroslava Filipovic, "Governments,
Banks, and Global Capital: The Emergence of the Global Capital Market
and the Politics of its Regulation," Ph.D. diss., City University,
London, 1994. (66.) For a consideration of the problem of state
autonomy and the different approaches taken to it in the neo-Marxist,
neo-Weberian, and neo-pluralist debates of the 1980s, see Cerny, The
Changing Architecture of Politics, especially chap. 4. (67.) This is
Almond and Verba's more familiar version of what they also call
"system affect." See Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic
Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963). (68.) Reich, The Work of
Nations. (69.) The question of foreign or domestic ownership is highly
problematic here. Reich argues that ownership is far less important
than the ability to attract capital. See Reich, The Work of Nations.
(70.) David M. Andrews, "Capital Mobility and State Autonomy: Toward a
Structural Theory of International Monetary Relations," International
Studies Quarterly 38 (June 1994), p. 201. (71.) Strange, States and
Markets. (72.) Spruyt, "Institutional Selection in International
Relations." (73.) Andrew Latham, "New Manufacturing Techniques and the
Evolution of 'Military-Postfordism'," paper presented at the annual
meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 28
March-1 April 1994. (74.) Economies of scale recently have become more
important in international trade theory, in contrast to traditional
concerns with comparative advantage. See Elhanan Helpman and Paul R.
Krugman, Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns,
Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy (Brighton,
England: Harvester Press, 1985). (75.) Stephen J. Kobrin, "Strategic
Alliances and State Control of Economic Actors," paper presented at
the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago,
21-25 February 1995.
COPYRIGHT 1995 World Peace Foundation; Massachusetts Institute of Tech
COPYRIGHT 1995 Information Access Company
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Books In Review
AntiChrist
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 43-44.
The Accursed One
Antichrist: Two thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil.
By Bernard McGinn. Harper Collins. 369 pp. $32.50.
Reviewed by Walter Sundberg
"You have heard," writes St. John in his epistles, "that Antichrist is
coming, so now many Antichrists have come; therefore we know that it
is the last hour." Who is Antichrist? He (or they) comes out of the
community of faith but is not part of it. His opposition to God is
doctrinal: he denies "the Father and the Son"; he refuses to "confess
Jesus"; he will "not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the
flesh."
These few references are all that we have in the New Testament.
Despite this, Antichrist has captured the imagination of Christians
across the centuries and engendered a disturbing, sometimes
frightening tradition. The reasons for the Christian fascination are
not hard to find. The word "Antichrist" itself is so compelling that
were there only one verse in the New Testament that used it, the
commentators across the centuries would still have written enormous
commentaries on that verse. That Anti- christ has to do with the
volatile mixture of the last times and the denial of Christ only adds
to his allure. He represents all that is obscure, conspiratorial,
chaotic, and evil in the Bible.
Among his companions from the scriptures are the pseudochristoi who,
Christ says, will come "in my name" and will "lead you astray"-"the
lawless one" (2 Thessalonians 2:10) who, by the power of Satan, will
impress the faithful with false signs and wonders, offering "a strong
delusion" to tempt "those who are perishing"; "Gog and Magog" who,
under Satan's command, will gather the nations for the final battle
with Christ (Revelation 20:2-10); the "beasts" of Revelation (16, 17,
19) that harken back to the "beasts" of Daniel (7); "the sons of
Belial" (Deuteronomy 13:13 and passim) who are "base" or "worthless,"
who practice idolatry, drunkenness, disrespect, evil speech, who are
"empty men" (2 Chronicles 13:7); and the conspiring nations and rulers
who take counsel against the Lord (Psalms 2:1-3).
In the history of the Church, Anti-christ has been variously
identified with the spirit of heresy (Polycarp), the Roman empire
(Irenaeus), the resurrected Nero (Chrysostom), and the Muslim,
Saracen, Turk, or Jew. The Waldensians and Spiritual Franciscans
identified him with the failed papacy (as did Wyclif, Hus, Luther,
Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and Cranmer). Roman Catholics, loyal to the
Pope, returned the favor and had their own list of Protestant
Anti-christs, beginning with Luther. In modernity, political figures
from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein have been tagged with the infamous
title.
Bernard McGinn, Professor of the History of Christianity at the
University of Chicago Divinity School and President of the American
Society of Church History, announces at the beginning of his careful,
detailed book that he wishes to take Anti-christ "seriously but not
literally." By the time he is done, he has covered everything from the
rise of Jewish apocalypticism to Roman Polanski's 1968 film Rosemary's
Baby and the Omen trilogy from the 1970s. He concludes by quoting
Denis the Carthusian: "Have we not worn ourselves out with that
accursed Anti-christ?"
McGinn's answer appears to be "yes." Except for the vulgar allegiance
of what McGinn calls "Fundamentalist Christians," "the legend" of
Antichrist no longer captures the imagination: "Most believing
Christians seem puzzled, even slightly embarrassed by Antichrist,
especially given the legend's use in fostering hatred and oppression
of groups."
While it is possible to reappropriate symbols like Antichrist from the
past, it is, says McGinn, a tricky business. He goes about it gingerly
by first calling upon Jung's reflections on the shadow side of
reality. Evil is part of the archetypal forms present to the
individual and collective self. It is "psychologically unwise" to
ignore entirely what Antichrist represents as the counterpart to the
good symbol of the Christ. McGinn next reminds the reader of the
persistence of the apocalyptic mentality in the late twentieth
century. This mentality is indicative of "the necessity of living in
expectation of the future," both in hope and in fear. Antichrist is
important insofar as he is a window on to the apocalyptic worldview.
These efforts of McGinn to make Antichrist relevant are decidedly
modest, even half-hearted; they cover only seven pages out of 280
pages of text.
In Antichrist, McGinn practices historical criticism in the classic
mode of the Enlightenment. Rational, scientific investigation of texts
is employed to establish the meaning of the topic at hand. The
interpreter acts as an objective outsider who, while assiduously
practicing disinterested awareness, uncovers the facts and pronounces
final judgment. The subject-matter under investigation, whatever it
is, is put in its place. The interpreter is superior to his subject
because he exercises intellectual control.
The Enlightenment method is powerful. Antichrist is a gold mine of
research, enhanced by the occasional attractive illustration from the
history of Christian art and pamphleteering. But its ultimate effect
is to make the reader dispense with Antichrist as one of those
portions of the scriptural witness whose time is past. The
unmistakable conclusion of McGinn's book is that Antichrist is dead-or
he should be.
To dispense with Antichrist, however, would be a tragic mistake. In
his otherwise scrupulous survey of sources, McGinn neglects that
gifted generation of dogmaticians who came to maturity in Europe
during the two decades between the world wars: Paul Althaus, Hermann
Diem, Emil Brunner, Heinrich Vogel, Edmund Schlink, and the Roman
Catholic Michael Schmaus-all of whom have written grippingly of
Antichrist as a revealed truth that speaks to our age.
Their argument is as follows: Christianity has been an essential force
in the emergence of modernity. Christian faith challenged the
pessimism and resignation of ancient culture and unleashed new
possibilities for political organization, cultural expression,
scientific and technical exploration, and the emergence of the
individual. These possibilities resulted from the sacred fact that
faith confesses: Christ frees humanity from the law and all the
burdens of oppressive, external authorities. The freedom of the gospel
is so powerful that it extends even to those who do not call upon the
name of Christ. And yet, without Christ, the divine gift of freedom is
misused to rebel against God and reject his law. This misuse of the
gift of freedom is the realm of the Antichrist. It permeates the
history of post-Classical Western civilization as politics, culture,
science, and individualism are perverted for selfish ends. Even within
the Church, the gospel, separated from obedience to God, becomes a
permissive principle of undiscriminating tolerance to bless human
desire and fantasy. Have we "worn ourselves out with that accursed
Antichrist?" No. Antichrist is not dead. On the contrary, he fuels the
engine that travels down the tracks of the Mainline.
Walter Sundberg is Professor of Church History at Luther Seminary in
St. Paul, Minn.
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Books In Review
Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 48-50.
Beyond Meaning
Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich:
Historical and Contemporary Issues.
Edited by John J. Michalczyk. Sheed & Ward. 240 pp. $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by Bernard N. Nathanson
Arthur Cohen has characterized it as "beyond the deliberations of
reason, beyond the discernments of moral judgments, beyond meaning
itself," and defined it as "the expression of ordinary secular
corruption raised to immense powers of magnification and extremity."
As one who absorbed the hideous drama of the Holocaust from the hushed
voices of my parents and the keening of relatives who had successfully
fled, I am on this subject afflicted with an aporia bordering on
rhetorical paralysis. Several years ago, I visited the Dachau camp in
the suburbs of Munich, and the experience was so desolating as to be
beyond tears, and yes, beyond meaning itself.
Nonetheless, the literature that attempts to understand the Holocaust
is vast and growing, and has matured to the point of specialization.
There is a body of work on the failures of the German clergy, another
body of work on the origins of the Holocaust in race science, still
another on the bankrupt Nazi judicial system-and now we add yet
another work on the German medical profession. John Michalczyk has
compiled and edited papers presented at a 1993 conference at the
Jesuit Institute of Boston College, Medicine, Ethics and the Third
Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues. The participants hailed
from markedly diverse disciplines, and included bioethicists Arthur
Caplan, George Annas, and Lisa Sowle Cahill; theologians Donald
Dietrich and Peter Haas; physician Michael Franzblau; historians
Daniel Nadav and Robert Proctor; journalists Nat Hentoff and Peter
Steinfels; and Holocaust victims Eva Kor and Vera Laska. There was
even one surgeon, Robert L. Berger, who was himself a victim who
survived the Holocaust. (Like Lawrence Langer, I abjure the term
"survivor" in favor of the more honest word "victim" in describing
those who lived through the horror; the word "survivor" strips the
drama of its limitless evil and instead suggests a natural- not
man-made-cataclysm: one Jewish physician liberated from Auschwitz
observed, years later, "If you lick my heart, it will poison you.")
Kierkegaard wrote that life is lived forward and understood backward.
The papers presented at the conference pay the conventional attention
to the historical roots of German National Socialism but regrettably
do not explore adequately the race science that developed in Germany
in the last half of the nineteenth century. John Efron has carried out
that task, however, with remarkable thoroughness in his book Defenders
of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-De-Siecle Europe.
Efron examines the "Jewish question" in Germany meticulously,
beginning with the egregious tales (carried from the Middle Ages into
nineteenth- century Germany) that Jewish males menstruated, that they
were uniformly effeminate, that Jews were more subject to insanity
than other races. He moves forward to describe the work of race
scientists such as Georg Wachter, a Dutch anatomist who studied the
skull of a thirty-year-old Jewish male and published his conclusions
in 1812. Wachter remarked on the large nasal bones, the square chin,
the typical bony impressions on the lateral sides of the orbits and
concluded that "among Jews, the muscles primarily used for talking and
laughing are of a kind entirely different from those of Christians."
Efron recounts the work of other race scientists such as Andreas
Retzius and Carl Vogt in the mid-nineteenth century who devised the
fatuous notion of using craniometry (measuring certain key diameters
of the head) to differentiate racial types, and by this mathematizing
of racism triumphantly divided Jews into two taxonomic niches: the
round brachycephalic and the long dolichocephalic. The Austrian
physician (all race scientists in Europe in the nineteenth century
were physicians) Augustin Weissbach published a paper in 1877 in a
scientific journal confirming the stereotypes based on his study of
nineteen Jewish males, and Bernhard Blechman in 1882 supported
Weissbach's conclusions with a study of his own.
Other race scientists built upon this scientifically grotesque edifice
to divide Jews into the brachycephalic Ashkenazis (of Eastern European
extraction) and dolichocephalic Sephardics (of Mediterranean
extraction). Constantine Ikow in the 1880s reclassified Jews into
three racial types on the basis of evidence derived from the
craniometry method. Prominent German psychiatrists such as Emil
Kraepelin and Richard Krafft-Ebbing stressed the emotional fragility
and the putatively high rate of insanity among Jews; Krafft-Ebbing
remarked that religious fervor in the Jewish community promoted
deviant sexual practices such as consanguineous marriages.
By 1900, 16 percent of all physicians in Germany were Jewish (Jews
comprised approximately 1 percent of the German population), and these
physicians were subjected to intermittent but vicious attacks. In 1875
the world-famous surgeon Theodor Billroth unleashed a lengthy anti-
Semitic harangue in the press, protesting the admission of Jewish
students in what he termed disproportionately large numbers to the
German medical schools. Only the great non-Jewish pathologist Rudolph
Virchow battled the anti-Semites by ridiculing the entire racial
typing project and defending the Jewish physicians fearlessly. Jewish
physicians such as Joseph Jacobs in Great Britain and Samuel
Weissenberg in Germany took on the race science question, conducting
studies and publishing scientific papers confuting the virulent
anti-Semitism of the German non-Jewish medical community-but by 1900
the damage was done. Jews had been thoroughly marginalized, and the
ground had been prepared for Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmeyer,
the founders of the German racial hygiene movement in the first two
decades of the twentieth century.
Daniel Nadav and other essayists in Medicine, Ethics, and the Third
Reich describe with impressive force the progressive deterioration of
medical ethics in the pre-Nazi and Nazi eras, as doctors stepped from
forced sterilization of the physically and mentally imperfect through
the various euthanasia programs devised first to care for the
suffering and then to the more comprehensive programs designed to
eliminate the "lives not worth living," the lives that were a "drag"
on the racial hygiene aspiration, and the lives of the "useless
eaters." In the introductory essay, Christian Pross observes that "a
combination of pseudoscientific racism, socioeconomic crisis, and
abandonment of the ideal of physician as healer produced doctors who
sterilized or killed so-called inferiors and social deviants in the
name of science." Pross states that only 350 German physicians
directly committed the medical crimes, but "many more were involved,
directly or indirectly, among them the cream of German medicine,
university professors, outstanding scientists and researchers." In the
Nazi era half of all physicians were members of the Nazi party, 26
percent of them were storm troopers, and 7 percent were in the
SS-these were much higher rates than for any of the other professions.
Regarding the fate of the German-Jewish physicians, Pross estimates
that between 1932 and 1945 at least 5,000 Jewish physicians were
expelled from Germany, several hundred committed suicide, and close to
2,000 perished in the death camps.
Lisa Sowle Cahill, in a moving valedictory to this dispiriting account
of the systematic betrayal of normative medical ethics, does not
tastefully avert her eyes; she calls the Holocaust exactly what it
was- an unmitigated and unmitigatable evil. She marks the role of the
Nazi physicians-the loyal traitors-as having caved in to "scientific
bias, ideological banality, professional self-serving, and moral
vacuity." In bioethical terms, it was a pervasively squalid,
unparalleled, and unimaginably destructive perversion of the
utilitarian theory of medical ethics.
Unfortunately Cahill-like other participants in the conference-relies
on that old saw of the "slippery slope," as though it were a logical
inevitability; she does however warn that "the 'slippery slope'
argument is a valid one, but it calls for caution and precision in the
application." Mary Mahowald, in her consideration of the "slippery
slope" argument, has acknowledged that the "slope" does exist but that
one can control the rate of descent (and even arrest it) by driving
what she terms "moral wedges" into the slope. This is not far from my
own position on the subject: the slope is not a slope at all but a
spiralling staircase descending into unfathomable depths of evil. At
every step one has the opportunity to rest, to survey the moral
landscape critically, to look back, to contemplate with great care the
next step, and even to climb back up if the occasion warrants. Had
German physicians (and for that matter, the German judiciary,
philosophers, academicians, journalists, and even the military) taken
this approach to National Socialism, it is a reasonable probability
that that terrifying, dizzying descent into hell would not have
occurred.
Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich is a powerful indictment of the
abject collapse of the German biomedical ethical system during (and
even preceding) the National Socialist regime. Others have written
authoritatively on the subject, but none with the eloquence and force
of the contributors to this volume.
Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., is author of Aborting America and The
Abortion Papers.
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Books In Review
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 44-48.
Yesterday's New Age
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and
Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. By Peter Washington.
Schocken. 470 pp $27.50.
Reviewed by Phillip E. Johnson
Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, kept a stuffed
baboon in her study to symbolize her rejection of Darwinian
materialism. The baboon was dressed in formal clothing, and held a
copy of The Origin of Species in its hand. Blavatsky accepted
evolution in a sense, but she insisted it was part of a process by
which humans can evolve into higher spiritual beings under the
guidance of a secret brotherhood of spiritual masters. When it was
convenient, Blavatsky could produce letters from angelic beings like
the "Lord Maitreya" and "Master Koot Hoomi"-letters magically
precipitated into her possession. These communications frequently
instructed her friends and disciples to agree to her whimsical demands
without complaint.
Sometimes Blavatsky was caught red-handed in forgery or in staging
ghostly appearances at her seances, but any disgrace was only
temporary. The faithful were aware that she cheated at times, but they
remained convinced that at least some of the psychic gifts she
displayed were genuine. Part of the explanation may have been that her
collaborators and disciples could not totally repudiate her as a
mountebank without exposing themselves as accomplices or dupes, and
they preferred to think well of themselves. Many of these followers
were so eager to be convinced of the reality of the spirit guides that
to Blavatsky it may have seemed harmless as well as profitable to give
them what they wanted. As her spiritual descendant George Ivanovich
Gurdjieff said of his own followers, over whom he ruled with a comic
sadism, "They are sheep fit only for the shearing."
I keep an artifact very much like Madame Blavatsky's baboon sitting on
top of my office bookcase: an ape in formal clothing smoking a cigar.
The ape was a gift from students at the Davis campus of the University
of California, given to commemorate a public debate I had there over
Darwinism with the anthropologist Vincent Sarich. (The students gave
Sarich a stuffed elephant with a book of "Just-So" stories.) Although
I never thought of the point before reading Peter Washington's history
of Theosophy, I suppose that my ape and Blavatsky's baboon symbolize
something similar. You are making a monkey of yourself if you are not
skeptical of people who claim to be in communication with a spirit
world, but it may be equally foolish to believe that a science based
upon materialism can explain everything.
Madame Blavatsky's successor as the world's most famous spiritualist
was the delightful Annie Besant, a true believer who spent her long
life going from one ideological obsession to another. Annie was an
inviting target for satire and yet hard to dismiss as a mere nitwit.
She played a significant minor role in the politics of Indian
independence, and always had important friends with money, political
influence, and artistic gifts (like Shaw and Yeats) to lend support.
Annie shared leadership of the Theosophy movement for a long time with
the pederast Charles Leadbeater, founder and self-appointed Bishop of
the Liberal Catholic Church, who fixed upon a handsome Indian boy
(known to the world as Krishnamurti) to be the World Teacher, avatar
of Lord Maitreya, and new Messiah.
Krishnamurti in adulthood settled in a gorgeous rural area of Southern
California called Ojai. He eventually repudiated Theosophy, and with
it the messiahship Besant and Leadbeater had chosen for him.
Thereafter he preached a pacifistic philosophy with such appealing
earnestness that he became more famous than ever. Krishnamurti's
social circle during the World War II years included many celebrities:
Bertrand Russell, Christopher Isherwood, Bertold Brecht, Thomas Mann,
Igor Stravinsky, and Greta Garbo. His closest colleague was the
novelist Aldous Huxley, a religious seeker who saw the need for
something better than agnosticism or materialism. Huxley was
unimpressed by Besant's "bunkum about astral bodies, spiritual
hierarchies, reincarnations and so forth," but he nonetheless
concluded that "a little judicious theosophy seems on the whole an
excellent thing."
Other characters in Peter Washington's history include the autocratic
Gurdjieff and his rebellious disciple Peter Ouspensky. Ouspensky wrote
incomprehensible treatises that still sell forty thousand copies a
year. Then there was the impressively learned Rudolph Steiner, who
left Theosophy to found a rival movement he unpronouncably called
"Anthroposophy." Steiner seems to have had more of substance to say
than the others, and some of his ideas have been taken seriously by
thinkers outside the spiritualist tradition.
If Steiner was the most intellectually accomplished of the
spiritualists, Gurdjieff certainly possessed the most colorful
personality. According to Washington, the Theosophy of Besant and her
crowd reflected in its way the sort of idealistic liberalism of the
early twentieth century that brought the League of Nations into being.
Gurdjieff in contrast represented "the complementary fascination with
barbarism and primitivism which colors the politics of Fascism and
works of art from Lawrence's novels to Stravinsky's early ballets."
Gurdjieff seems to have been most at home in chaos and conflict. He
possessed a knack for escaping from impossible circumstances and
landing on his feet. This was mainly due to his formidable ability to
persuade or intimidate people to do whatever he wanted. His method of
spiritual leadership was to stir up strife and bully his disciples
mercilessly while they performed endless menial tasks.
Peter Washington's account of these characters is highly amusing at
times, especially when he reports the fantastic doings of Madame
Blavatsky and her successors in a dry factual style, rightly trusting
the reader to see the joke. By the end of the book, however, I lost
interest. This was partly because the Theosophists were so tame in
comparison to what we are used to in the late twentieth century: no
mass suicides or gun battles, no poison gas or dynamite, no drugs or
kinky sex orgies. Leadbeater's adventures with boys would stir up no
more than a minor scandal today in the most respectable religious and
secular organizations. Several times a week my San Francisco newspaper
reports something that tops for zaniness anything Besant ever dreamt
of doing. Even Gurdjieff seems almost responsible in comparison to
some of the cult leaders of more recent times.
For that matter, the science-based secular religions of the late
nineteenth century that attained so much prestige among intellectuals
demanded almost as much credulity as Theosophy, and they did a lot
more harm. Judged in comparison to some of the manifestations of
Marxism and Freudianism, for example, Theosophy's absurdities look
relatively innocent. If one must believe in something ridiculous, it
may be safer to believe in the communications of Master Koot Hoomi
than in promises of a workers' paradise or in the kind of psychiatry
that Freud practiced on his own patients. May Madame Blavatsky and her
baboon rest together in peace.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law at Boalt Hall, the law school
of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Books In Review
The Paradoxical Vision
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 50-53.
A Politics of (Sober) Hope
The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-first
Century. By Robert Benne. Fortress. 242 pp. $16 paper.
Reviewed by Janet Marsden
No book of recent vintage has provided such a comprehensive and
intelligent overview of current options in relating Christian faith to
the general culture as Robert Benne's The Paradoxical Vision. Benne,
who is Professor of Religion at Roanoke College in Virginia and very
much a Lutheran, divides his subject into three parts. First and most
substantively, he sets out what he means by "the paradoxical vision"
in public theology. Second, and perhaps of less interest to most
readers, he examines the ways in which the Lutheran churches in this
country have advanced or betrayed that vision. Finally, he analyzes
the work of three theologians who he believes have best exemplified
the paradoxical vision: Reinhold Niebuhr, Glenn Tinder, and Richard
John Neuhaus.
Writing on "The Lutheran Difference" in these pages (February 1992),
the evangelical historian Mark Noll observed that "America has enjoyed
a surfeit of Reformed tendencies and a very occasional nudge in the
Lutheran direction. A better balance is possible." Taking his cue from
Noll, Benne says he wants to provide that balance by nudging Christian
ethics in the Lutheran direction. He clearly wants to do so in an
ecumenical way that will also influence Roman Catholics, and both
liberal and evangelical Protestants. Benne agrees with those who have
in recent years urged that it makes more sense to speak of "public
theology" than to use the older term, "social ethics." He writes,
"Public theology, I think, refers to the engagement of a living
religious tradition with its public environment-the economic,
political, and cultural spheres of our common life." Although the
cultural sphere has priority, these spheres are interdependent. "The
cultural system, by which I mean the guidance system of the
society-its coherent pattern of meanings and values (often supplied at
least in part by its religious inheritance)-is heavily dependent on a
modicum of economic and political stability and success."
Public theology does not have an easy time of it in a putatively
secular society. Benne employs Neuhaus' image of "the naked public
square" and, demonstrating a masterful grasp of the pertinent
literature, shows how we have come to our present unhappy circumstance
in which public life is so largely divorced from our cultural
"guidance system." He puts a very large part of the blame on the
Protestant mainline that has abandoned its tradition of giving
religious and moral definition to American life. With Noll, he
believes American Christianity has been marked by a crusading impulse,
an impulse that frequently served the country well. But now the
Protestant mainline has turned this crusading impulse against itself
in what Benne calls "the great reversal." In 1950, when the National
Council of Churches succeeded the old Federal Council, Episcopal
Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, its first president, said that the
council's formation marked "a new and great determination that the
American way will be increasingly the Christian way, for such is our
heritage. Together the churches can move forward to the goal-a
Christian America in a Christian world."
Although Benne does not note the irony, the 1950s establishment
language about Christian America is today the almost exclusive
preserve of the then despised (and still despised) "religious right."
What Benne does note with detailed insight is the way in which "the
great reversal" has resulted in the undermining of the confidence of
the old establishment. In recent decades, mainline leadership has,
also with a crusading passion, pitted "the Christian way" against "the
American way." Vietnam and the adversary culture of the sixties are
part of the story, but in the mainline academy and church-and-society
curias, the controlling doctrine is now that "Salvation will come from
the revolutionary cultural praxis of gender feminism, homosexualism,
multiculturalism, and militant ecological movements." Although overt
Marxist rhetoric is muted following the collapse of communism, a
basically Marxist analysis still drives these adversarial movements.
In a footnote that deserves to be in the main text, Benne writes: "The
Marxist notion that dominant groups have arranged society and culture
for their own exploitative purposes remains a key to their
perspective. Power relations between the oppressed and oppressor
(relations of groups are never seen as more complex) provide the
dominant model of analysis. Following from this, it is assumed that
those who are oppressed by the dominant group (male, straight,
European, capitalist) have a particularly relevant grasp of true
reality. Since they are not blinded by the ideological screens that
surround the oppressor, they are able to see clearly and move
decisively toward justice. Their revolutionary praxis will bring
wholeness to the oppressed and, in the longer run, to the whole
society. The dream of a sinless and unerring proletariat has not been
given up. It has simply been translated into new categories." Benne
joins that analysis to a host of supportive citations from
denominational statements and influential writers such as Rosemary
Ruether and Robert McAfee Brown. In the 1960s, the World Council of
Churches adopted the maxim, "The world sets the agenda for the
church." Benne observes, "What better way to diminish the role of
one's own religious vision than to give 'the world' religious
authority? If you can't beat them, join them."
While the liberal mainline turned its revolutionary energies against
the alleged oppressions of America and the Christian tradition itself,
other religious forces moved to the fore. "As the Protestant mainline
has weakened, the Catholic public voice has taken its place. It has
become the closest thing we have to a public church in this age of
religious realignments." He is critical of aspects of Catholic
leadership, but also appreciates its strengths: "While generally
tipping toward the left in political and economic matters, and to the
right on social issues, [Catholics] appear to operate with more
fidelity to their own defining principles, not the secular ideologies
of the day. Nor do they intentionally attack their own defining
principles, as is the case in so many Protestant attempts at public
theology." Generally missing from Benne's analysis is the increasing
role of evangelical Protestantism in our public life, and its
convergence and cooperation with Catholics in giving definition to the
cultural "guidance system." Although he does not say so, perhaps that
is because he is not sure that evangelicalism has provided or can
provide what he means by public theology.
Another major source of public theology, in Benne's view, are the
neoconservatives, by whom he means figures such as Michael Novak,
George Weigel, Robert Jenson, and Richard Neuhaus, along with the
scholars, publications, and institutions that they have gathered
around them. The Protestant mainline and, to some extent, the Catholic
bishops have studiously tried to ignore the neoconservatives, Benne
says. "Indeed, one can read through many tomes of mainstream
Protestant public theology without coming across any of the names of
the neoconservative theologians, though the neoconservatives have
certainly been more influential in public discourse than their
detractors."
Benne describes his three exemplars of the paradoxical vision-Niebuhr,
Tinder, and Neuhaus-as, respectively, a Christian realist, a hesitant
radical, and a neoconservative. But one suspects that for Benne these
are distinctions within the category "neoconservative." As he enlists
thinkers in the neoconservative cause, he knows that he might also be
suspected of purloining thinkers for his Lutheranism. After all,
Niebuhr belonged to what was then the Evangelical and Reformed Church,
as much Calvinist as Lutheran; Tinder is an Episcopalian (although his
son is a Lutheran pastor); and Neuhaus, long a Lutheran pastor, became
a Roman Catholic. "My primary purpose," writes Benne, "is not to claim
these three as crypto-Lutherans, as if I were trying to enhance the
reputation of Lutheranism by adding a few luminaries to its legacy.
Rather, it is to show how the paradoxical vision expressed by these
three has had significant effects on their public theologies." In
other words, the paradoxical vision that they exemplify is
significantly derived from, and best articulated by, the Lutheran side
of the Reformation tradition. Whether or not the three are as Lutheran
as Benne suggests-in the case of Neuhaus, Benne treats only the
writings from his Lutheran years-they do represent what he means by
the paradoxical vision.
That vision tries to protect the universality and radicality of the
gospel from every form of political or cultural captivity. It nurtures
a sober view of human nature and the possibilities of change, seeks
self- consciously to avoid both liberal sentimentality and
conservative cynicism in social ethics, and views history with a keen
appreciation of limitation and irony-and undergirds all this with a
vibrant sense of hope in the Lord of history. The paradoxical vision
insists that "The New Testament gospel of the suffering God who
abjured all worldly power and all worldly group identifications simply
rules out those schemes that compromise the radicality and
universality of the gospel. The cross of Christ freed the gospel from
enmeshment in all human efforts to save the world. No one was with
Christ on the cross to die for our sins. Or viewed differently,
everyone was with Christ on the cross, but only as passive inhabitants
of his righteous and suffering person. No boasting is permitted.
Therefore, the paradoxical vision rules out salvific politics."
Salvific politics is the demonic temptation to which both liberal and
conservative thought in the Calvinist tradition too easily succumb, as
do Catholics, Benne thinks, with their drive toward a synthesis of
Christ and culture. The exemplars of the paradoxical vision, on the
other hand, provide a theological framework that resists being turned
into substantive social ethics or mere ideology. Thus Reinhold
Niebuhr, after he had overcome the leftist sentimentality of his early
years, found a "method of proceeding in life and thought [that] was as
paradoxical as their actual substance. He proceeded dialectically,
playing off one polarity against another and finding his judgments
somewhere in the complex interplay of those polarities. That is why
theologians of both the political left and right can authentically
claim him as a mentor. Both Robert McAfee Brown on the left and
Michael Novak on the right have grounds for claiming to be genuine
students of Niebuhr. . . . He was willing to admit that he had changed
his mind. But the basic framework of the paradoxical vision remained
solid from the mid-thirties onward." (One may agree with the substance
of Benne's description of Niebuhr, while wondering whether Brown's
promotion of liberation theology in recent years is not precisely the
kind of salvific politics that the paradoxical vision so decisively
rejects.) Tinder, while less well known outside academic circles than
Niebuhr or Neuhaus, may be the purest representative of the
paradoxical vision. His much celebrated textbook, Political Thinking,
is prefaced with this statement from Soren Kierkegaard: "The paradox
is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a
paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. The
supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something
that thought cannot think." Benne is clearly uncomfortable with
Tinder's severe reservations about the morality of politics, even to
the point of suggesting (in a manner that Benne thinks somewhat
"sectarian") that Christians should not involve themselves directly in
the political enterprise.
"Neuhaus, of all the neoconservative public theologians, has been the
most prolific and energetic on a number of fronts," writes Benne. "His
presentation of the paradoxical vision is the most straightforward of
the three. . . . Perhaps more than anyone since Niebuhr, Neuhaus has
pressed his paradoxical vision right into the midst of American
economic, political, and cultural debates." That being said, Benne is
uneasy with Neuhaus' "draconian" restrictions on the Church's direct
role in the political arena. And it is true that Neuhaus wrote many
variations on the maxim, "When it is not necessary for the Church to
speak, it is necessary for the Church not to speak." Here again,
however, it must be noted that Benne limits himself to what Neuhaus
wrote as a Lutheran. His "draconian" restrictions, one may suggest,
were in large part attributable to Lutheranism's lacking the
Magisterium and developed body of social doctrine that Neuhaus has
found in the Catholic Church. At least to this reviewer, the
paradoxical vision is significantly modified in Neuhaus' writings as a
Catholic, as, for instance, in the pages of this journal and in his
Doing Well and Doing Good, the 1992 book on the encyclical Centesimus
Annus.
As I stated at the outset, no recent book has offered such a
comprehensive and intelligent discussion of contemporary options in
public theology as Robert Benne's The Paradoxical Vision. I have not
even touched on the extensive and marvelously constructive discussion
of "direct" and "indirect" ways in which the Church influences
culture, or the careful distinctions he makes between "advocacy" and
political partisanship. At the end of it all, Benne asks: "Will the
'Lutheran difference' survive among Lutherans? Does the paradoxical
vision have a chance for survival and growth in the religious
community that has brought it this far in American history?" His
survey of the record of the several Lutheran bodies comes up with a
doleful answer. Nonetheless, he has no doubt that "the paradoxical
vision will continue to inspire individual Christians of all
communities." His last word is thus that "Still there is hope." That
may seem a wan note on which to conclude, until one remembers the
object of Robert Benne's hope: the crucified and risen Lord.
Janet Marsden is a writer living in New York City.
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taeso98q.htm
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Deadly Social Engineering by Daniel Mahoney
The Conservative
By Daniel J. Mahoney
Critique of Social Engineering
The West began the twentieth century enamored of scientific
progress—a.k.a. "man’s mastery over nature"—and the
comprehensive improvement, even the radical transformation, of
society. Today, modern men and women have been chastened. We know that
such progress comes with a price—and that it does not guarantee
moral improvement.
The devastating consequences of man’s hubris in our time, from
the emergence of destructive technologies to the totalitarian goal of
engineering society, rightly give us pause. We are led to ask, is
there an unavoidable link between the hopes that modern man placed in
the conquest of non-human nature on the one hand, and the totalitarian
efforts to conquer or transform human nature on the other? What
relationship holds between modern science and what Friedrich Hayek in
The Counter-revolution of Science called "scientism"—the effort
to apply the methods of mathematical physics and geometry to human
nature? How scientific, in fact, are the aspirations for a science of
society that could make "social engineering" possible?
Most conservatives now agree we should strive to improve man’s
lot through technological innovation and economic growth. Yet they
remain skeptical about thrusting centralized planning on irreducibly
complex societies. Conservatives don’t reject reason outright
but rather what the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott
called "rationalism in politics"—a style of politics that
ignores the wisdom latent in tradition. Political rationalists
don’t foresee the unintended consequences of uprooting
long-established institutions and social practices that have
well-served human needs. This sort of rationalism forgets, too, that
societies can best reform their evils by pursuing possibilities for
improvement that already inhere in their established ways of life.
Conservatives, by contrast, have tended to support traditional ways of
life and localism for their own sake. They know that a world dominated
by aggressive rationalism is one that will have little room for
personal independence or for the local color that gives life so much
of its charm. There is a risk, though, that the conservative critique
of rationalism will go too far and become a full-fledged critique of
reason. It is best to say that reason itself shows the limits of
reason and hence the dangers of scientism and social engineering.
Aristotle provides the first, and perhaps unsurpassed, rational
critique of the misapplication of the rationalist spirit to human
affairs. He carries out his critique of scientism in the name of both
true science and healthy politics. In his Ethics, he reminds the party
of reason that science must respect the imprecision built into its
subject matter. The study of politics, for example, can never be as
precise as geometry. In his Politics, he gently mocks the first
systematic city planner, the eccentric Hippodamus of Miletus, who
formulated a detailed plan for a mathematically ordered "best regime."
Aristotle reserves his harshest criticism for Hippodamus’s
advocacy of a law honoring those who discovered something new for the
city—especially new laws. Aristotle does not deny that some
political reform is good, precisely because old laws are sometimes
foolish. But he also insists that law-abidingness depends upon habits
that arise from deeply rooted customs; habits that the reckless
pursuit of political change will surely undermine. Hippodamus
characteristically divided everything—the population, laws, and
land—into threes because he wrongly thought that human nature
was amenable to mathematical manipulation. A true science of man,
Aristotle counters, takes its bearing from that mix of reason and
passion, wisdom and custom, that is characteristic of human life.
In the spirit of Aristotle, conservatives are rightly skeptical of
utopian politics. They deny that progress, however desirable, can
ultimately transform human nature. They know that the most important
initiatives for change and conservation come from below, from a
vigorous, independent civil society. And above all, they fear the
"experts" who think they know better than ordinary folks how to run
their lives. More than liberals, they are aware of what C. S. Lewis
famously observed in The Abolition of Man: "What we call Man’s
power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over
other men with Nature as its instrument." Conservatives instead defend
the good sense of ordinary people who are in touch with the stuff of
life.
A brilliant new book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, beautifully articulates the
case against social engineering. Its author, James C. Scott, is no
political conservative but his is, nonetheless, a deeply conservative
critique of what he calls "high modernist" ideology. High modernism
distrusts local and practical knowledge and seeks to exchange the
prudence of ordinary people for an administrative ordering of nature
and society by experts. When linked to totalitarian collectivism, high
modernism can lead to immense social disasters, such as the
experiments with collectivizing agriculture in the Soviet Union and
Maoist China that together took the lives of 50 million people.
When state intervention ignores the utility of long-established
institutions, when planners "map" society in a way that abstracts from
the real concerns and activities of ordinary people, when the state
adopts a belligerent attitude toward those it sets out to help,
modernization becomes an instrument of totalitarian manipulation and
control. Lenin, for example, believed society could be controlled from
the center with little or no input from the "administered." (He
borrowed from the theories of the American efficiency expert Frederick
Taylor and from the "war socialism" implemented in Germany during
World War I.) With no place for the give and take of ordinary politics
and economics, his revolutionary schemes had predictably perverse
results. For example, collectivization prevented the Soviet Union from
efficiently producing those elementary goods (fruits, vegetables,
dairy products) that even the most "backward" agrarian societies had
had little difficulty providing for their people. Scott shows that
such authoritarian social engineering fundamentally misjudges the
nature of man and society: Ordinary human beings are far too naturally
independent, and society too diffuse and complex, to justify
"scientific" intervention in every aspect of human life.
As the Czech statesman Václav Havel has written, totalitarianism
presents an extreme version of modern science’s plan for the
objective, rational control of the world. He notes modern
science’s deep distrust of common sense and ordinary experience:
Modern science treats the common sense world of personal
responsibility as a subjective realm unworthy of scientific respect.
We should not be surprised, then, that politicians and ideologues
imbued with its spirit seek to make society more "rational"—and
thus more conducive to administrative control—through social
engineering.
But our twentieth-century experience should have taught us that
nothing is less scientific than the illusion that the human world can
be brought under scientific control. And as the French political
philosopher Pierre Manent has noted, there can be no true science of
society without serious meditation on the nature, needs, and limits of
the human soul.
Daniel J. Mahoney is chairman of the department of political science
at Assumption College.
THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF SOCIALISM
The majority of the intellectual leaders of the socialist
movement…are socialists because socialism appears to
them…as "science applied in clear awareness and with full
insight to all fields of human activity."… • •
•
Compared with the work of the engineer that of the merchant is
in a sense much more "social," that is, interwoven with the free
activities of other people.… His special knowledge is
almost entirely knowledge of particular circumstances of time or
place…. But though this knowledge is not of a kind which
can be formulated in generic propositions, or acquired once for
all, and though in an age of Science it is for that reason
regarded as knowledge of an inferior kind, it is for all
practical purposes no less important than scientific knowledge.
• • •
…All we have said here is directed solely against a misuse
of Science, not against the scientist in the special field where
he is competent.… The main lesson at which we have arrived
is indeed the same as that which one of the acutest students of
scientific method has drawn…"the great lesson of humility
which science teaches us, that we can never be omnipotent or
omniscient, is the same as that of all great religions: man is
not and never will be the god before whom he must bow down."
—F. A. Hayek, The Counter-revolution of Science:
Studies in the Abuse of Reason
Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves
questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things
are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific
training gives a man’s opinion no added value. •
• •
If we are to be mothered, mother must know best.… In every
age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any
sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the
hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They "cash in."
It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will
certainly be science.…
Let us not be deceived by phrases about "Man taking charge of
his own destiny." All that can really happen is that some men
will take charge of the destiny of others.… The more
completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.
—C. S. Lewis, "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State"
THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1998
http://www.english.ttu.edu/grad/ortiz/cccc98.htm
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Dialogic Learning Networks
Eugene Ortiz, Texas Tech University, CCCC98, Chicago
What I want to discuss here is how Email Discussion Groups can be or
are being used to transform the educational experience from a static
or closed system to one that helps students recognize that their
classes as well as their extra-curricular life are dynamic parts of a
larger universe and that they already play a part in that universe;
and furthermore, that they have the tools to play a more pro-active
part in that universe if they choose to recognize and use those tools.
As the number of computer-based classrooms increases around the
country, so increases the need for composition/rhetoric teachers to
consider what networked computers do to classrooms and how we can use
this information to help our students. One foundational concept to
absorb is that networked computing does not simply extend the
classroom, but transforms it. For example, in two 1996 studies,
student use of email networks outside the classroom were shown to (1)
involve discussion about classroom assignments, (2) to coordinate
classroom meetings, and (3) to socialize (Palmquist, 1996; Williams &
Merideth, 1996). This third factor, socializing, is especially worth
examination in light of Vygotsky’s theories linking cognition and
language to social development and social constructionist concepts of
knowledge making through community dialogue (Harris & Wambeam, 1996).
For example, it might be helpful to discover how to capitalize on
findings that when students were separated into three treatment groups
and asked to construct an informative composition either for their
teacher, a self-selected peer, or distant peers, students writing for
distant peers performed better than the other students overall
(Gallini & Helman, 1995). Further, another recent study suggested that
if instructors are familiar with and tolerant of behavior patterns
used by novices as they move into electronic communication
environments, traditional course content and technological skill
necessary to function in a computer-based classroom can be introduced
concurrently and successfully (Williams & Merideth, 1996).
I submit, that if students can learn traditional course content and
master computer networking concurrently, students write better when
addressing distant peers, and language and cognition are directly
linked through community dialogue to social development, then it’s a
small leap to suggest that involving first year composition students
in conversations on the Internet on topics of their own choosing
should immerse them in the activity of epistemic rhetoric (Bolter,
1991) and provide a method to inculcate them into the waiting academic
community of knowledgeable peers. If we base our classrooms around
this activity, courses designed to teach effective writing will become
more than just another English class where the students focus on
producing documents that conform to a static set of rules, but rather
will reveal themselves as dynamic, contextual, playgrounds (Derrida,
1994) of rhetors learning their craft through active participation in
its practice (Gergen, 1985).
In 1962, Michael Oakeshott suggested that:
it may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance which make
up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a
manifold of some sort. And, as I understand it, the image of this
meeting-place is not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation.
Oakeshott’s statement is no less relevant today than it was more than
35 years ago. Conversation is what Electronic Discussion Groups are
all about. When students are in a required class their attitude can be
hostile because they want proof that there is something valuable to be
learned. Also, in a first-year composition class, students often try
to respond to assignments as they always have in the past,
particularly the student who says, "I always got good grades in
English in high school." Electronic Discussion Groups engage students
in the learning process because they expose students to a critical
audience that allows not only for expression of ideas, but also for
questioning of ideas. Written electronic conversations on the Internet
allow students to act upon and participate in the shaping of the
rhetorical situation. In this environment students can grow and
identify with the world they live in rather than think of it as
something alien or hostile to them, or the domain of the elite or
intellectuals only.
What I want to emphasize is that unless students are actually placed
into the real environment of interlocutors who are not constrained by
the artificiality of the classroom, they are not going to be motivated
to learn what we have to teach. When I ask students at the beginning
of the semester what they want to learn from my class, they usually
respond by saying that they want to learn to be better writers so they
can write better papers or that they want to learn better grammar so
they can write better papers. When I ask what they expect or want to
get out of the class, they usually respond by saying that they expect
or want an "A" or "a good grade." Those answers indicate a cultural
bias which has arisen as a result of living the majority of their
lives in a culture that requires artificial solutions to artificial
problems with the abtraction of a "grade" being the focused
measurement of success. The discourse of the intellectual marketplace
of ideas is fundamentally different from that in a classroom, yet it
is this intellectual marketplace of ideas we are supposedly preparing
them for.
Collaborative classroom environments have been introduced as a means
of countering this artificiality, but one cannot escape from the fact
that students will eventually realize that even writing for each other
is still just part of an assignment in an "English" class. I am not
trying to argue against collaborative classroom learning environments
because I am in favor of them over traditional lecture-style
classrooms. I am suggesting, however, that we can build on them by
using the Internet to reach beyond the classroom to engage students in
real conversations with people whose primary interests are in
exchanging ideas. When students go online, they are forced to deal
with real problems of exchanging ideas through writing in an
environment where ideas matter more than grades.
When this occurs, the process of learning to value written
conversation is no longer an abstract concept or a set of rules to be
memorized solely for use in an "English" class -- or even their other
classes, but is seen as an ongoing process of creating and negotiating
meaning through language. To me, proof of this comes at the end of the
semester when student attitudes about writing change. At the end of
each semester, I ask students to write an essay summing up the class
for future students. After a semester of intensive writing via online
forums, the subjects of student discussions change from writing better
papers and getting good grades to an awakening recognition of the role
of rhetoric outside the classroom. Let me finish with a few quotes
from some fall 96 essays:
Subscribing to different internet discussion lists was a learning
experience in itself. By subscribing to each different one we saw
different ways of writing, responding, and different personalities.
This was also used to improve our social skills. Most importantly, I
think it made us form our own opinions and learn how to back them
up. This is not just an important skill for this class, but also a
very important life skill as well.
The neat thing about this class, is if a person is illiterate when
it comes to computers, that person can still stay up with the rest
of the class. The main point of this paper is that there will always
be a purpose in fulfilling a requirement in anything a person does,
even if the person does not know what that purpose is at that
momenty in time. You kno't ko something for nothing. This semester
Mr. Ortiz had us subscribe to four internet mailing list. They were
Writers, Civic-Values, Y-rights, and Belief-L. These internet
mailing lists connected our class with many different people around
the world to communicate with about writing and other political or
social issues. I feel that these lists were very beneficial because
these lists exposed me to different people with different opinions
that clashed with my own views.
Through this, I learned how to express my own views and opinions
carefully enough not to offend anyone else on the list. This
semester, I know our class stirred up a lot of controversy on this
list, but I feel that these list and these people are a perfect
example of the actual people we will face when we get out into the
real world.
A Few Resources:
Online version of this paper:
http://english.ttu.edu/grad/ortiz/cccc98.htm
CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV® lists:
http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html
Deja News: http://www.dejanews.com
The Dialogic Learning Network: http://www.dlndln.com
DLN is intended to be a network of public and college discussion lists
(listservs, listprocs, etc.) whose primary goal is to increase the
range of student written experience, and thereby increase their
effectiveness in written discourse. By creating fields of overlapping
discourse communities, college students and the community-at-large can
meet and learn from each other through direct dialogue.
Usenet Groups for Writing and Literature:
http://www.marlboro.edu/~nickc/nnews.html
References
Bolter, Jay David. (1991). Writing Space. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Derrida, Jacques. (1994). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse
of the human sciences, Contexts for Criticism, second edition,
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Faigley, Lester. (1992). Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and
the Subject of Composition: Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Gallino, Joan K. & Helman, N. (1995). Audience awareness in
technology-mediated environments. Journal of Educational Computing
Research, 13(3), 245-261.
Geertz, Clifford. (1983). ‘From the native’s point of view’: On the
nature of anthropological understanding. Local Knowledge, New York:
Basic Books.
---. (1983). The way we think now: Toward an ethnography of modern
thought, Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books.
Gergen, Kenneth J. (1985). The social constructionist movement in
modern psychology. American Psychologist 40:3, 266-275.
Harris, Leslie D. & Wambeam, C (1996). The Internet-Based Composition
classroom: a study in pedagogy. Computers and Composition, 13,
353-371.
Oakeshott, Michael. The voice of poetry in the conversation of
mankind. Rationalism in Politics, and other essays, 1962, pp. 197-198.
Palmquist, Michael E. (1993). Network-supported interaction in two
writing classrooms. Computers and Composition, 10.4, 25-57.
Unger, Joseph. "Widening the Classroom's Horizons: Using the
Internet's Usenet News as an Invention Heuristic." 11th Annual
Computers and Writing Conference. El Paso, May 1995.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher
Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wenger, Michael & Payne, D. (1996). Human information processing
correlates of reading hypertext. Technical Communication, 43.1, 51-60.
Williams, Hilda L. & Merideth, E. (1996). On-line communication
patterns of novice internet users. Computers in the Schools, 12(3),
21-31.
http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Publications/Speeches/DeGetteSpeech.html
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Diana DeGette's 1998 Opening Convocation SpeechColorado College Opening
Convocation Address
"The Value of a Liberal Arts Education"
Given by Diana DeGette
August 31, 1998
U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a 1979 Colorado College graduate,
received an alumni honorary degree at opening convocation.
Thank you, President Mohrman. This moment is very meaningful to me.
I stand here as a proxy for so many people. This degree may have my
name on it, but it is primarily a product of Colorado College. Here
I encountered the history of ideas brokered by committed, wise, and
dynamic teachers. Bob Loevy taught me all I know about American
government. Tim Fuller opened my eyes to Aristotle's politics. I had
the privilege of attending J. Glenn Gray's last lectures, and I was
in his class the block he died. And Susan Ashley remains a personal
hero to this day, both for her intellectual rigor and her personal
commitment to her students. Many of these professors and so many
others will inspire this generation of CC graduates, including the
incoming class of 2002.
But one instructor symbolized my time at Colorado College. He taught
me the virtue of compassion and tolerance. He forever changed my way
of thinking and my interaction with others. Colorado College would
not have been such a profound and challenging experience without Al
Johnson, the debate coach. He helped me to set high standards for my
conduct and my conversation, and to have confidence in the person
molded and shaped by my collegiate experiences. He was, and
remains, an inspirational teacher, a close friend, and a role model,
not just to me, but to generations of CC students like Mark Paich
and John Shoskey.
I would also like to recognize my family: my husband, Lino, my two
daughters, and my sister, Cara. They are present today and have
given me constant love and support. Thanks for coming.
The Value of a Liberal Arts Education
In 1974, the year before I entered as a freshman, the college
celebrated its 100th anniversary. As part of that celebration, Tim
Fuller arranged for an address by Michael Oakeshott, the British
political theorist. What a wonderful parallel that today, on the
125th anniversary of the college, Tim himself will give the address.
If any of Professor Fuller's students are here today, you won't be
surprised that I mention Oakeshott. He has a way of coming up in any
lectures by Tim, and we may hear more about Oakeshott in a few
minutes. In any event, Tim will be pleased that I am still reading
political philosophy these many years on.
In his lecture, Oakeshott spoke of the value of a liberal arts
education and the value of Colorado College as a liberal arts
institution. Here, on this campus, Oakeshott reminded his audience
that we are what we learn, that this is "the human condition." He
argued that a liberal arts education is a form of "emancipation."
Education is the way we learn to become human and learn to make the
choices that chronicle our lives. A liberal arts education also
teaches us how to handle the difficulties that accompany our
existence. For Oakeshott, life is "a predicament, not a journey." A
human being is a "history" and he (or she) makes this "history...out
of...responses to the vicissitudes...encountered."
I agree. In a world of advancing technology, exponential increases
in scientific and medical discoveries, and instant communication, a
liberal arts education teaches us how to understand and to use the
opportunities created by our fluid, complex world. A liberal arts
education teaches values, compassion, and empathy. It opens our eyes
to vast possibilities and new choices. It enables us to be a part of
history and to make history. It allows each of us to have open and
candid conversations with the philosophers of the past and to
formulate new paradigms of thinking for the future. It gives us a
common heritage of literature and the voice to capture our
experiences for those to come. It gives us the tools for life and
insight into life itself.
A liberal arts education takes us from the predicable, commonplace,
limited lives of our childhood and adolescent years and illuminates
new horizons and passages in our minds through which we confront a
larger set of human experiences. We gain a measure of the
self-knowledge of which Socrates spoke, tempered by Cartesian
skepticism. We witness the "nasty, brutish" side of Hobbes' vision
of the state of nature and the need for Locke's "politics of trust."
We see the fallibility of the human state, as presented by Reinhold
Niebuhr, and the importance of forgiveness, as articulated by St.
Paul. We share in the experiences and lessons expressed by Jane
Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elie Wiesel, and Toni Morrison. We
see the visions of Raphael, Michelangelo, Picasso, and Joan
Mitchell. One of the best classes I took here was on the history of
jazz. I left CC with a love for Sonny Rollins - and also Tchaikovsky
and Van Morrison.
A liberal arts education is not simply a study of the humanities. It
is a bridging of C.P. Snow's two cultures - The Humanities and the
Sciences - it is to develop a "Renaissance mind" even as one gains a
degree within a specialty of interest. Oakeshott called a liberal
arts education an "adventure in human understanding," and these
adventures take place in mathematics, astronomy, foreign languages,
genetics, and environmental studies every block on this campus.
The Threat to Liberal Arts
As a product of a liberal arts education, in front of an audience
committed to the study of the liberal arts, I am surely preaching to
the converted. But the liberal arts remain under attack elsewhere.
There are many people who see a liberal arts education as an
expensive extravagance or a waste of time. Such people counsel
against a liberal arts education because it is "too soft" and
"irrelevant." They often say that the liberal arts are a diversion
from the "real world" of jobs, money, status, and media popularity.
There are other people who speak more forcefully. They see it as a
danger, the road to misguided thinking, to paradox, to sin, to the
collapse of the polity, or to worldwide catastrophe. What are they
afraid of? For them, liberal arts students are intellectual
troublemakers. We are not willing to blindly follow dogmas nor are
we willing to have our thinking directed by others. We don't follow
the party line. These critics want to limit the freedom inherent in
a study of the liberal arts, to pre-determine the outcome of our
lifelong engagement with learning. The attack against liberal arts
is nothing less than an attack on rationality, on individual
autonomy, and on cultural diversity. Oakeshott warned about all of
this. He cautioned us about the powerful forces pushing toward
conformity, easy answers, callousness, and bigotry. He spoke of
those who want to reduce us to Pavlovian responses: to let appetite,
love of money, fanaticism, or hatred rule over compassion, mutual
respect, responsibility, and tolerance.
Liberal Arts and Public Policy
There is no more important place to consider Oakeshott's warning
than in our national politics. Public policy-makers should be guided
by the rigorous thinking prized in a liberal arts education. But too
often policy-makers look only at the polls.
There are many good reasons why a liberal arts education is vital to
the development of sound public policy. Let me give you a few
examples. Classics scholar Martha Nussbaum has argued that fiction
helps us to see the facts about the human condition in more depth
than a mere recitation of statistics. In short, fiction is often
more real than our presentation of the real world, especially in
court cases or government reports. Fiction can help us to become
more understanding and empathetic. So, we may learn more about the
human condition from Homer, Melville, Joyce, or Baldwin than we can
fathom from reading the New York Times. Nussbaum has underlined a
central truth. We must have a breadth of experience and openness of
mind to understand the people we encounter and the effect of
legislation on the people we serve. We cannot view people as
stereotypical, predictable, or flotsam on the tide of history's
progress.
A liberal arts education teaches us to look beyond ourselves and
beyond the present. Policy-makers must look to the future. For
example, Emerson once wrote that each of us is a "steward" of the
environment. We live in an interdependent biosphere. Therefore, we
have a duty to keep the air, the water, and the land safe for our
use, and the use of the many to come. We must be good stewards, and
knowledge of history, theology, and philosophy is just as important
as knowledge of biology, economics, or business.
Public policy also needs the liberal arts to encourage mutual
respect for others. I agree with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that race is
the great failure of the American experiment. In his last Sunday
sermon more than 30 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged
each person to become an activist for civil rights, regardless of
our circumstances or profession. The great challenge for both our
public and private institutions will be to discuss race though a
frank and full discourse, with the goal of understanding each other
and beginning to heal the rifts that separate us. We must recognize
what Dr. King called our "inter-related network of mutuality," the
interdependence of our people and our world.
I am encouraged by several developments, among them the president's
discussion about race. There has been an additional movement toward
a quiet and profoundly effective racial dialogue in the Congress. I
am proud to be a member of the steering committee of the
Congressional dialogues on race, sponsored by the Faith and Politics
Institute. This bipartisan action, involving more than 100 members
of Congress, has been underway for almost a year. The highlights,
for me, have included a visit to Selma with Congressman John Lewis,
hearing General Colin Powell speak from profound personal experience
about the need for affirmative action, and involvement in my own
race relations group in Denver. All of this is directed at
encouraging a respectful discussion of race in our schools, in our
businesses, and in our communities. One of the essential places for
this dialogue to advance is on campuses just like this one. Now is
the time not just to explore the perspectives of thinkers like
Cornell West, but to talk openly and honestly among the college
community about tough issues like affirmative action, bilingual
education, and the continuing racial gap in our society. The
challenge for policy-makers is the challenge for this incoming
class, whom we celebrate in this convocation. How do all of us craft
meaningful lives with the lessons of a liberal arts education as the
overriding foundation? As incoming students, I ask you to consider
what can be done for the betterment of the world in which we live. I
have learned one important lesson in Congress. Armed with a quality
liberal arts degree, one person truly can make a difference. But I
soon discovered that I could draft legislation, take the issue to
the floor, improve the legislation through helpful compromise, forge
lasting consensus, an steer the bill through passage and the
president's signature. I could make a difference. All that was
required was idealism, initiative, and imagination - a view of what
could be, not entrenchment in present predicaments. In just my first
term in Congress, I have written and passed legislation on
children's health care, environmental protection, reclamation of
brown fields, and other issues because I have been guided by my
experiences here.
And I can testify to the fact that each and every one of you can
also make a profound, positive difference, if you try. Many of you
have already stepped forward. Some of you have become environmental
activists, business owners, published writers, or recognized
scholars. Most of you have already become opinion leaders.
There will be a leadership vacuum in politics, business, finance,
entertainment, and literature. You will be needed immediately as you
leave Colorado College or as you leave graduate school. This is your
moment for preparation. Your time is now. Do everything possible to
acquire the intellectual tools for leadership. The future beckons
with the dawn. When Oakeshott spoke here 25 years ago, he said that
he had "crossed half a world" to find himself in "familiar
surroundings, a place of learning." Today, I have crossed half a
lifetime to find myself back at this place of learning, my
intellectual home.
Once again, I am honored to join the Colorado College community as
it begins this academic year. I thank you for this honorary degree,
and I wish all of you great success, personally and professionally,
in this year and in all that comes your way in the future.
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.wctc.net/~mjbach/mag11.htm
-------------------------------------
Democratic Theory and Practice
________________________________________________________________________
_
Database: Gen'l Reference Ctr Gold (GPIP)
Subject: Plato; Periodicals
Library: South Central Library System (WI)
________________________________________________________________________
_
Full content for this article includes illustration and photograph.
Source: History Today, August 1994 v44 n8 p44(6).
Title: Theory and practice: democracy and the philosophers.
(2,500 Years of Democracy)
Author: Benjamin Barber
Abstract: The philosophers Plato and Socrates have traditionally been
viewed as hostile to democratic principles, but revisionists now
challenge the view that Socrates' methods were antidemocratic. While
there are some small truths in the revisionists' arguments; in fact,
Socrates was not a democrat.
Subjects: Philosophy, Ancient - Political aspects
Democracy - History
People: Socrates - Philosophy
Plato - Philosophy
Full Text COPYRIGHT History Today Ltd. (UK) 1994
Plato and the remarkable character Socrates whom he created and with
whom he is often confounded have both long been associated with
scepticism about democracy. Platonic idealism has been understood to
be a 'foundationalist' view incompatible with the constructivist and
creative tendencies of democracy. If we believe ideals are written
somewhere in stone -- in nature or heaven or science -- (or that
everything exists in an ideal form) human institutions can only mirror
them. Only if we believe they are human constructions, are we
responsible for them. Foundationalism and democracy are inherently at
odds with one another.
Recently, however, some commentators have tried to rescue Socrates
from his creator Plato and argue that Socrates is a kind of democrat.
Socratic method is, after all, discursive, even conversational, and
reflects the democratic belief that truth emerges from debate. Now I
am a political theorist rather than a classicist, and I do not have
the classicist's command of ancient Greek. I approach our subject here
in a fashion that serious classicists, if they are polite, will deem
at best casual. Nonetheless, since my ultimate aim is to discuss the
relationship of democracy and philosophical foundationalism, I will
venture to tread on classicist turf. For there is no better way to
show how far the democrat's position is from foundationalism than to
challenge the (to me) spurious claim that Plato's Socrates is, in his
own fashion, a kind of democrat.
In what follows, I will address the problematic relationship between
the attempt to set political and moral norms in some kind of
metaphysical groundwork (what philosophers call 'foundationalism') and
the democratic insistance that all social norms be subject to ongoing
discussion and revision. In particular, I want to challenge the
argument some have made, that a controversial approach to rhetoric of
the kind exhibited by Socrates is the same thing as democracy. On the
contrary, I will argue, while philosophical discourse and rhetoric are
about truth and knowing things, democracy is finally about common
decision-making and action, about doing things in common, in the
absence of truth and in the presence of conflict -- even ignorance.
On the way to distinguishing democracy from mere rhetoric, and common
action from the philosophical search for truth, I will also have
something to say about political education (civic education) as it
arises out of, and conditions, my understanding of democracy. To do so
will, I believe, help illuminate the premises and the entailments of
what I understand to be democracy -- something about as far from the
Socratic purview as can be imagined.
If one wants to pursue the Platonic conviction that politics rests on
knowledge, that prudent 'doing' derives from adequate 'knowing', one
might compare Socratic dialectic and democratic political
deliberation. But it is the character of politics in general, and of
democratic politics in particular, that it is precisely not a
cognitive system concerned with what we know and how we know it, but a
system of conduct concerned with what we will together and do together
and how we agree on what we will to do. It is practical, not
speculative, about action rather than about truth. It yields but is
not premised on an epistemology and in this sense is necessarily
pragmatic. Where there is truth or certain knowledge there need be no
politics, even though (as Plato warns) politicians and citizens may
wantonly ignore truth and certain knowledge in pursuit of base
interests or raw power.
But democratic politics begins where certainty ends. The political
question always takes a form something like: 'What shall we do when
something has to be done that affects us all? We wish to be
reasonable, yet we disagree on means and ends and are without
independent grounds for making the choice'. For Socrates the point is
to secure the independent ground -- whether through dialectical
discourse or pure speculative reasoning. Neither leave room for
politics.
To believe in democratic politics is to renounce foundational sources
of conflict resolution. In this sense politics is ineluctably
pragmatic and so, as William James says in Pragmatism and the Meaning
of Truth, pragmatism turns its back resolutely and once and for all:
... upon a lot of inveterate habits dear
to professional philosophers ... away
from abstraction and insufficiency,
from verbal solutions, from bad a pri-
ori reasons, from fixed principles,
closed systems, and pretended abso-
lutes and origins. As democratic politics is pragmatic, so pragmatism
is democratic: 'See already how democratic [pragmatism] is', James
rhapsodised; 'Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources
as rich and endless
...'
Politics occupies the domain of practical action and, as John Dewey,
the great American champion of pragmatism, who applied pragmatic
principles to education, libraries, citizenship and democracy in the
first half of the twentieth century, suggests in The Quest for
Certainty 'the distinctive characteristic of practical activity ... is
the uncertainty that attends it'.
The philosophical quest for certainty inspires a longing:
... to find a realm in which there is an
activity which is not overt and which
has no external consequences. 'Safety
first' has played a large role in effecting
preference for knowing over doing and
making. Like the Platonists, modern foundationalists continue to
believe that the:
... office of knowledge is to uncover
the antecedently real, rather than, as is
the case with our practical judgement,
to gain the kind of understanding
which is necessary to deal with prob-
lems as they arise.
However, what Bertrand Russell said ruefully about the quest for
mathematical truth seems to me to fit perfectly the quest for
political truth in the form of foundations antecedent to democratic
politics:
Real life, is, to most men, a long sec-
ond-best, a perpetual compromise
between the ideal and the possible; but
the world of pure reason knows no
compromise, no practical limitations,
no barrier to the creative embodying in
compromise, no practical limitations,
splendid edifices of the passionate aspi-
rations after the perfect, from which all
great work springs. Remote from
human passions, remote even from the
pitiful facts of nature, the generations
have gradually created an ordered cos-
mos, where pure thought can dwell as
in its natural home, and where one, at
least, of our nobler impulses can
escape from the dreary exile of the
actual world.
Politics is not an ordered cosmos in which our nobler impulses can be
given expression, it is how we try to govern ourselves in 'the dreary
exile of the actual world'. Here we are, to use a metaphor favoured by
both philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce and Michael Oakeshott,
afloat on an open and endless sea where, in Peirce's words, we must
rebuilt our ship 'on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry
dock and to reconstruct it out of the best materials'. Plato's
Socrates pretends to argue the principles of navigation while on the
open sea, but in truth he has his own charts and co-ordinates and a
clear sense of his destination. He is not really trying to adjudicate
different notions of an ideal port or to facilitate a consensus among
the crew about how to navigate; he is merely educating them (by the
circuitous but pedagogically and rhetorically sound path of
question-posing) to the truth of his destination and his co-ordinates.
He is out to correct error, not forge provisional agreement; he wants
to get to his home port, not live on the open sea. Or perhaps, as a
true philosopher, he wants merely to contemplate the starry firmament;
he certainly does not wish to do anything in particular or in common
with his fellow voyagers.
Because philosophy always seeks to 'create the world in its own image'
(Nietzsche), its tyranny is to transform the discussion of politics
into a discussion of knowledge, even among those wishing to defend the
autonomy and sovereignty of politics, which means that even citizens
in search of a provisional basis for action may be seduced into a
discussion of the foundations on which the criteria by which decisions
are taken must be based. This is the turf of philosophy, where the
politician and the citizen cannot but acquiesce to its mode of
argumentation, if not its actual substantive arguments.
Foundationalists invite us to admire the manner in which Socrates
pursues truth and (since he claims it is dialectical) suggest that it
models the dialectical strategy of politics -- as if politics too were
a form of truth-seeking. Daniel Webster is closer to the mark,
however, when he reminds us that governments are instituted for
practical benefit, and not to serve as subject of speculative
reasoning. The question is not which politics is made legitimate by a
certain dialogical epistemology, but which epistemology is made
legitimate by a certain democratic politics.
Epistemological concerns enjoin a definition of democracy in terms of
its root values and antecedent normative foundations and then ask us
to assess the methods by which they can be discovered and affirmed. A
strictly political construction of democracy, on the other hand,
focuses on active citizenship and ongoing practical deliberation. It
assumes a regime in which we make (will) common decisions, choose
common conduct and create or express common values in an ever-changing
practical context of conflicting interests and competition for power
-- a setting, moreover, where there is no necessary agreement on prior
goods or certain knowledge about justice or right, and where we must
proceed on the premise of the base equality both of interests and of
the interested.
Voting is not a discretionary option for determining what is to count
as true; if it were, majority rule would certainly be absurd. But in
practice it is a compulsory entailment of the need to choose in common
under conditions where interests are equal and where objective (i.e.
non-normative) standards do not obtain. This political definition
suggests certain attributes of democratic politics that help explain
why democracy cannot and does not rest on 'foundations' in the way
that (say) natural law or Platonic justice do, and why, however
similar the mode, philosophical discourse and political debate are
essentially distinctive modes of human intercourse. Among democracy's
most central attributes is its revolutionary spirit, which is tied to
its spontaneity, its creativity and its responsiveness to change.
Plato may have been a dialogician and Socrates may have sought a
conversational form of truth-seeking that has something in common with
democratic discourse, but who would regard either of these ancient
heroes as a model revolutionary? Democracy is animated by a spirit of
revolution and spontaneity that to ancient aristocratic philosophers
could only have appeared as profoundly corrupt and corrupting -- the
very opposite of that 'well-ordered commonwealth in speech' that Plato
hoped to establish in The Republic. Democracy always brings with it a
whiff of revolutionary self-assertion: that sense of fresh ownership
that each generation brings to a constitution or political order by
re-embracing its principles. Democracy is in this respect arrogant,
wanting to install the Now as the permanent arbitrator of the past and
the future, wanting to make revolution a permanent feature of the
political landscape rather than just a founding mechanism for a new,
more legitimate politics of stability or the locus classicus of law
and order.
American founding statesman and educational philosopher, Benjamin
Rush, reminded would-be democrats that, though in the American system
'all power is derived from the people, they possess it only on the
days of their elections'. Thomas Jefferson loved 'dreams of the future
more than the history of the past'. Can the same be said of citizen
Socrates? Jefferson warned against looking 'at constitutions with
sanctimonious reverence, and deem(ing) them like the ark of the
covenant, too sacred to be touched'. Does Socrates urge his
interlocutors to show less reverence for the politeia and the nomoi?
Even when he challenges the nomoi of Athens, does he not insist (in
The Crito) that they be treated with deep respect? Finally, Jefferson
is known famously for his insistence that 'the tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It
is its natural manure'. Could Socrates share such sentiments? Would
his rhetoric lead him to boast as Jefferson suggested in his letter to
James Madison of January 30th, 1787, that a 'little rebellion now and
then' was a 'good thing' in and of itself? And if not, how democratic
is he? If we are to put Socrates' beliefs to a democratic test, surely
Jefferson's revolutionary ardour and not some abstract notion of
discourse is the proper standard.
It might be suggested that both Socrates and Jefferson were
constitution-builders, but there is a paradox here. To be sure, a
revolution is always a founding and thus a foundation, as well as the
kindling of a certain spirit of spontaneity hostile to
foundationalism. As Hannah Arendt, the emigre political philosopher
and author of The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem, has
observed, in America the revolutionary spirit founded a constitution
which in time came to be at odds with that spirit -- as social
contracts and fixed laws are always likely to grow at odds with the
spirit of innovation that creates and ratifies them. Jefferson saw
democracy itself, more particularly ward government and active
participation by citizens in self-governance, as the remedy to the
ossification of the democratic constitution. To the ancients,
ossification (that is to say predictability and government by law) was
the whole point of a republican polity. The call for ward government
and full participation by citizens 'not merely at an election one day
in the year, but every day' was a way to put the demes in the place of
a constitution. To Socrates, a constitution was a way to put law in
the place of government by the demes.
The lesson taught by Jefferson is that original consent derived from
the foundational principles of natural right (the essence of social
contract reasoning) is inadequate to the democratic mandate -- which
is why I have spent so much of my career trumpeting the benefits of
strong, participatory democracy. By this logic, it is not just
foundationalism, but foundings themselves that imperil the democratic
orders they establish. The tension between constitutional order and
the revolutionary spirit has been the subject of two recent books that
pointedly capture the contradictions between founding and democracy:
Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution and, perhaps
even more suggestively, Bruce Ackerman's We The People: Foundations.
In his book, Ackerman offers a provocative version of 'dualist
democracy' in which 'Rights Foundationalists' face advocates of the
actual exercise of popular sovereignty in a contest over the meaning
of democracy and of the revolution that made it. Ackerman sees in
historical moments like the Founders' rejection of the Articles (and
the procedural principles the Articles mandated), or Roosevelt's New
Deal, revolutionary emblems of the nation's true democratic spirit.
Foundationalism, even where it represents an authoritative
establishing of the credentials of democracy, tends then to undermine
democracy, and democracy both requires and entails an immunity to its
own foundations in order to flourish.
Michael Oakeshott once said rationalists are 'essentially ineducable',
by which he meant that, wedded to formal models of truth and
cognition, they were closed to the evidence of their senses about the
here and now, and the commonsense conversation of those around them.
It was presumably Socrates' aim to buttress the soul against the
misleading prejudices of the senses and to replace ordinary
conversation with the dialectical discourse of truth-seekers. Socrates
was indisputably an educator, but just as indisputably, he was himself
essentially ineducable, and thus immune to democracy. Others may need
his dialectical help, but he knows his truths up front and has nothing
to learn from them, or from the democratic process they fashion in
order to see them through a world of uncertainty. Democrats do not
just engage in democratic dialectic: they learn. Democracy enjoins
constant, permanent motion -- a gentle kind of permanent revolution, a
movable feast that affords each generation room for new appetites and
new tastes, and thus allows political and spiritual migration to new
territory. Does this really describe the temper of Socrates or the
object of his dialectics?
The democrat also insists that democracy itself, along with its
discourse and rules and modi vivendi, all remain subject to on-going
correction -- that they be seen as provisional not permanent.
Democratic principles originate in historically important,
psychologically pertinent and morally admirable grounds and may be
helped along via some form of rational discourse. But their legitimacy
-- how we know them politically -- depends on the democratic process
itself. Political knowing here meets John Dewey's standard: 'Knowing',
he writes, 'is not the act of an outside spectator, but of a
participator inside the natural and social scene (so that) the true
object of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action'.
Not Socrates thinking and discoursing about a problem, but engaged,
affected participants trying to do something about its consequences is
what makes a politics democratic. The criterion by which this form of
knowledge is judged 'lies in the method used to secure consequences
and not in metaphysical conceptions of the nature of the real'.
Dewey's 'method' turns out to be democracy itself. Dewey thus
concludes that:
the method of democracy ... is to bring
... conflicts out into the open where
their special claims can be seen and
appraised, where they can be discussed
and judged in the light of the more
inclusive interests than are represented
by either of them separately.
Dewey is portraying something like a general will, where the
coincidence of particular wills describes a common good which can be
willed on behalf of the community. The process modifies and legimates
as 'public' not only the interests and principles that adjudicate
them, but the process itself. Hence, Article V of the US constitution
renders the constitution itself subject to revision via a difficult
but specified set of democratic procedures. The operating principle of
democracy produced by the imperative of autonomy is reflexivity.
Democratic rules, the definition of citizenship, the character of
rights -- however they may originate -- become legitimate only when
subjected to democratic deliberation and decision. Surely, no one
would want to suggest that Socrates makes reflexivity the chief
principle of his mode of discourse? Its test, surely, is how
effectively it arrives at a truth already established in some
ontological sense. Socratic discourse neither yields nor wills truth;
it discovers or discerns or reveals truth, already-made by some other
means. Will simply does not come into it, and so common willing has no
relevance.
Democracy on the other hand is self-correcting; its insufficiencies
are corrected democratically rather than by the imposition of
externalities on the democratic process. The process is dynamic
because it is self-transforming; in the fullest sense educative. Dewey
not only links democracy and education, but suggests that:
popular government is educative as
other modes of political regulation are
not. It forces a recognition that there
are common interests, even though the
recognition of what they are is still
confused; and the need it enforces of
discussion and publicity brings about
some clarification of what they are.
Clarification can take a long time, but democracy holds out to those
with the patience to struggle with, rather than against the promise of
reform from within. It took nearly 150 years for American citizenship
to be extended from propertied white males to all adult Americans. But
the struggle that led to the gradual expansion of the civic ambit was
a democratic struggle in which the rules of democracy were used to
modify the rules of democracy. A benevolent king or a Platonic
Guardian would have acted far more quickly and decisively, but at the
expense of the liberty of those in whose name democracy was evolving.
Jefferson's notion that the remedy for the ills of democracy is more
democracy speaks to its self-correcting character.
Perhaps the clearest way to differentiate democratic from
foundationalist reasoning is to contrast cognitive judgement and
political judgement and the differing forms of education they entail.
Foundationalism reverts to epistemological modes of understanding and
sees in education the necessary cultivation of cognitive faculties.
Plato's account of education in The Republic is the paradigm.
Democracy, by contrast, is firmly rooted in politics and publicity and
understands education as an apprenticeship in liberty (Tocqueville):
the acquisition of public judgement -- something for which politics
itself is a useful training. I will not rehearse the arguments I have
ofered elsewhere in defence of political judgement as an enterprise
distinct from other forms of judgement, but there is much to be said
for the view that political judgement is defined by activity in common
-- rather than thinking alone -- and is, therefore, what democratic
politics produces rather than (as with foundations) what produces
democratic politics. Democratic political judgement can be exercised
only by citizens interacting with one another in the context of mutual
deliberation and decisionmaking on the way to willing common actions.
What is required is not a foundational mandate or individual mental
acumen in rigidly applying fixed standards to a changing world, but
such political skills as are necessary to discovering or forging
common ground. What is right, or even what a right is, cannot in
itself determine political judgement. Rights themselves are constantly
being redefined and reinterpreted and are hence dependent for their
normative force on the engagement and commitment of an active citizen
body. Bills of Rights, Madison warned, are paper parapets from which
real liberty cannot be defended -- more of Hobbes' 'covenants without
the sword'. In any case, the citizen wishes only to act in common in
the face of conflict, not to know with certainty or to uphold ancient
norms that claim to be foundational. The object is to resolve or find
ways to live with conflict, not to discover the grounds of bliss or a
path to eternity. Civic judement is thus always provisional,
constrained by a sense of uncertainty. It is made uneasy by every form
of absolutism, including foundational rights absolutism. Democratic
politics is what men do when metaphysical foundations fail, rather
than metaphysical foundations reified as a constitution.
Democratic education is thus always part socialisation in democratic
norms like tolerance and reciprocity and part lesson in scepticism and
subversion. It means learning to live with uncertainty, and its
posture is necessarily critical. It prefers challenging truths to
imparting them. Its demeanour is humble rather than hubristic, social
rather than solipsistic. Where philosophy posits, democratic education
questions, my earlier argument is apposite here:
If political judgement is understood as
an artful political practice conducted
by adept citizens, then to improve our
judgement we must strengthen our
democratic practices. To think aright
about politics, we must act aright, and
to act aright calls for better citizens
rather than better philosophers. If we
find our political judgement defective,
it may be the fault of too little rather
than too much democracy. (From Bar-
ber, The Conquest of Politics, Princeton
University Press, 1988).
Democracy may be established by a foundational logic but it is
sustained only by a logic of citizenship and the requirements of civic
education. It is made in Athens but enacted and practised in Sparta
(the Athenians, said Rousseau, knew how to think aright; the Spartans
how to act aright).
Citizens, to conclude, are men and women who have learned to live
freely and in common under rules they make for themselves, and who are
thus capable not just of survival but of flourishing both in spite of
the foundations that have supported their birth and in the absence of
all foundations. Like every political system, democracy too has a
birth mother, and thus rests on foundations. Unlike every other
political system, however, democracy is necessarily self-orphaned, the
child who slays its parent so that is may grow and flourish
autonomously. This may dismay those like Burke who believe that, in
hacking up its aged parent, democracy destroys its soul; and it would
be reviled by Plato, because it abandons the founding forms and
embraces the flawed copies. But democracy is government for, by and of
the flawed, so that, paradoxically, its strength lies in its
acknowledgement of weakness and its adequacy derives from its
recognition of insufficiency, (an insufficiency, which -- because it
is shared -- is the basis for our equality).
Reflexivity conditioned by civic education once again turns out to be
democracy's great virtue. Democracy is the debate about what democracy
is; education for democracy establishes the meaning of democracy;
citizenship entails an argument about whom democratic citizenship
includes; democratic politics debates and ultimately defines the
limits of the democratic policy, thus adjudicating issues of private
and public, society and state, individual and community. Popular
sovereignty means common ground trumps revealed truth. Truth's jealous
lovers (philosophers) can hardly be expected to befriend common ground
or provide discursive models for securing it.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1984)
and The Conquest of Politics (Princeton University Press, 1988);
William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Harvard University
Press, 1978); Plato, The Republic (Cornford or I A Richards); I.
Scheffler Four Pragmatists (Humanities Press, 1974); Michael Oakehott,
Rationalism in Politics (Basic Books, 1962); John Dewey, Liberalism
and Social Action (Capricorn Books, 1963; originally published in
1935).
-- End --
http://www.112358.com/gold.html
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Justice and the Golden Rule
by Robert R. Chambers January 15, 1997
Justice and the golden rule, along with motherhood, are values that
nearly everyone finds hard to disparage. Both of them are assumed to
be applicable to a very wide range of human relationships, and are
said to have been used in wide variety of cultures all over the world.
These two ideas are taken by many people to epitomize morality, and
are tacitly thought to be different views of the same ideal. Of course
they in fact are different, but philosophers have created
modifications of each in an attempt to adapt them to a variety of
circumstances. I think it is fair to say that the general public
treats them both as applicable across the board.
What I wish to suggest is that each of these ideas has a core meaning
that is very clearly sound when applied to certain circumstances, and
in those cases is as valuable as people think. However, that people
have often stretched these moral rules beyond the core area each of
them is basically inapplicable to many other circumstances. And
further, that where one of these core meanings properly applies the
other does not. In other words, while they are each a high ideal, and
in their core meaning are applicable to a fairly wide range of
circumstances, they are mutually exclusive.
The idea of justice is certainly very old, surely prehistoric and for
most people is encountered when they are small children. The core
meaning is distributive justice; the distribution of the burdens and
benefits of a society according to some desirable pattern. This is a
concept that requires three roles be accounted for. A distributes
something to B in a way that is fair to C. Of course one of these
parties can play two roles as when A distributes something to himself.
But, justice always involves the question of whether a recipient is
getting the proper treatment in comparison to another potential
recipient.
The golden rule is also of ancient origin. Confucius, twenty five
hundred years ago is given credit for being the first writer to
enunciate the principle, "What you do not like when done to yourself
do not do to others." This is the negative wording and is the core
idea. The principle has been often applied to situations in which some
positive action is to be taken. However, it is difficult to formulate
a suitable definition of the golden rule that would assure that the
preferences of the actor would coincide with the welfare of the
recipient. In the case of the golden rule there are only two roles, A
the actor and B the recipient.
When I look for an example to illustrate the relationship of justice
and the golden rule, I remember a time when I was reading while
keeping an eye on the children who were playing on the rug. My
daughter was teaching her brother, who is two years younger, to play a
game of cards. The game involved dealing hands and playing the cards
with the higher card taking the trick. My daughter had a good hand and
was winning when suddenly a fight broke out. She said, "Give it back.
I played the higher card. The trick belongs to me." My son said, "No,
it's mine. You have six tricks and I don't have any. It's my turn to
take a trick." As in so many arguments they were locked into
fundamentally conflicting points of view and the game broke up.
Reflecting on it, if it had been a matter of justice, I would have
ruled against my daughter. Had I had been allocating the card tricks
there is no way that justice would have been served by giving her all
seven tricks and giving him none. On the other hand he was violating
the golden rule by taking a trick from her under circumstances where
he would have objected (if he had known enough) if she had done that
to him. Since there was no reason for me to be allocating tricks, the
core idea of justice was not applicable in this case. This was a two
party case in which, assuming knowledgeable players, the core golden
rule was applicable and should have prevailed.
The question of justice comes up where one of the parties is taking a
positive action that will directly affect another party and there is
some question about whether this is fair to a third party. The golden
rule comes up when a party should be refraining from action that will
directly affect another party. Thus the core idea of justice has to do
with taking positive actions, of the golden rule with refraining from
action. It should be understood that these basic situations can
masquerade in different words. When junior asks pop if he can take the
car, and pop refrains (shrugs), it is probably a case of justice with
the third party being an imaginary son who behaves as Pop would want.
Pop's action is equivalent to a positive handing over of the keys
because junior is entitled to them.
In order to further examine the dichotomy involving these two
principles, I suggest we start with the idea that there are two basic
kinds of relationships people can assume between them that are
mutually helpful. One is the relationship of neighbors, which is the
basis of the Free Society, and the other, the relationship of
teammates, characteristic of a Status Society. As applied to
governments, these terms are essentially the same as the civil
association or Societas and the enterprise association or Universitas
discussed by Michael Oakeshott. However, I use the Free and Status
Society terminology to apply not just to government, but also to other
secondary societies such as families, churches, businesses, etc.
Each of these two relationships has its own characteristic rules, laws
and institutions and its own set of ethical principles. In a general
way the rules of a Free Society are negative rules, and those of a
Status Society positive rules. The operation of a pure Free Society is
made up of transactions between pairs of members -- the society itself
is not an acting entity. The rules apply the same to all members --
nobody has official status. On the other hand the operation of a pure
Status Society involves the society, which is an operating entity,
distributing benefits and duties to the members. It involves assigning
each of the members a status for these purposes. Status can reflect
whatever characteristics are appropriate in a Status Society.
To act in accordance with justice is a very important principle in the
Status Society. Justice means acting in accordance with the status of
the parties involved. The actions in a Status Society are done by or
on behalf of the society and all actions must be carried out by the
members acting as agents for the society. Thus all actions involve the
distribution of duties or benefits or both.
The concept of justice does not apply to the Free Society. The society
is not an acting entity and does not distribute anything. As between
pairs of members the obligations are whatever they agree to. People
who enter into obligations that affect how they distribute things
between them to the point where one member can be unjust to another,
have created a small Status Society. The functioning of a market
place, which is a Free Society institution, often leads to
misfortunes, and maybe to illegal activities, but not injustices. Of
course if the market place is modified by Status Society elements then
justice may well apply to those.
On the other hand the golden rule clearly applies to the Free Society.
The rules of a free society are those that permit neighbors to
function within their own sphere of choice by requiring that they
refrain from actions that would unduly impinge on other's spheres of
choice. The golden rule is a moral principle that is the basis of this
kind of rule.
The golden rule does not apply to a Status Society because people are
carrying out their assignments and do not have the option of
refraining from doing something. Of course there are many free society
elements in most Status Societies and the management of a Status
Society is often less than entirely desirable. So as a practical
matter the golden rule will still have its place where management of
the team has broken down.
The fact that has to be borne in mind is that all societies in the
real world use a mixture of the Free Society and Status Society rules.
All of them will thus have some aspects where justice and other
aspects where the golden rule should be applied. Nevertheless we
should resist the tendency to think that all actions should be just or
that all actions should be in accordance with the golden rule. It
would be more appropriate to say that all actions should satisfy one
or the other. What we ought to do is analyze the structure of the rule
and the society to which the action is related before deciding which
principle to apply.
What we ought not do is twist the core meanings of these two
principles in an effort to apply them to circumstances where they
don't fit. Specifically, application of a positive golden rule is a
corruption and should be rejected. Specifically, attempts to discern
justice in the operation of a pure free market is also a corruption
and should also be rejected.
Most of all we ought to recognize that neither justice nor the golden
rule are applicable to ethics across the board. Rather, they are each
applicable respectively to one of the two approaches to beneficial
operation of a society.
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9506/bork.html
----------------------------------------------------
Hard Truths About the Culture War
Robert H. Bork
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 18-23.
What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot
and decadence germinating within American society-a rot and
decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was
the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . Sector after
sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal
ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and
social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.
-Irving Kristol, "My Cold War"
Equivocation has never been Irving Kristol's long suit. About the fact
of rot and decadence there can be no dispute, except from those who
deny that such terms have meaning, and who are, for that reason, major
contributors to rot and decadence. We are accustomed to lamentations
about American crime rates, the devastation wrought by drugs, rising
illegitimacy, the decline of civility, and the increasing vulgarity of
popular entertainment. But the manifestations of American cultural
decline are even more widespread, ranging across virtually the entire
society, from the violent underclass of the inner cities to our
cultural and political elites, from rap music to literary studies,
from pornography to law, from journalism to scholarship, from union
halls to universities. Wherever one looks, the traditional virtues of
this culture are being lost, its vices multiplied, its values
degraded-in short, the culture itself is unraveling.
These can hardly be random or isolated developments. A degeneration so
universal, afflicting so many seemingly disparate areas, must proceed
from common causes. That supposition is strengthened by the
observation that similar trends seem to be occurring in nearly all
Western industrialized democracies. The main features of these trends
are vulgarity and a persistent left-wing bias, the latter being
particularly evident among the semi-skilled intellectuals-academics,
bureaucrats, and the like-that Kristol calls the New Class. But why
should this be happening? The short answer is the one Kristol gives:
the rise of modern liberalism. (The extent to which he would agree
with the following argument about the sources and future of modern
liberalism, I do not know.) Modern liberalism grew out of classical
liberalism by expanding its central ideals-liberty and equality-while
progressively jettisoning the restraints of religion, morality, and
law even as technology lowered the constraint of hard work imposed by
economic necessity. Those ideals, along with the right to pursue
happiness, are what we said we were about at the beginning, in the
Declaration of Independence. Stirring as rallying cries for rebellion,
less useful, because indeterminate, for the purpose of arranging
political and cultural matters, they become positively dangerous when
taken, without very serious qualifications, as social ideals.
The qualifications assumed by the founders' generation, but
unexpressed in the Declaration (it would rather have spoiled the
rhetoric to have added "up to a point"), have gradually been peeled
away so that today liberalism has reached an extreme, though not one
fears its ultimate, stage. "Equality" has become radical
egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of
opportunities), and "liberty" takes the form of radical individualism
(a refusal to admit limits to the gratifications of the self). In
these extreme forms, they are partly produced by, and partly produce,
the shattering of fraternity (or community) that modern liberals
simultaneously long for and destroy.
Individualism and egalitarianism may seem an odd pair, since liberty
in any degree produces inequality, while equality of outcomes requires
coercion that destroys liberty. If they are to operate simultaneously,
radical egalitarianism and radical individualism, where they do not
complement one another, must operate in different areas of life, and
that is precisely what we see in today's culture. Radical
egalitarianism advances, on the one hand, in areas of life and society
where superior achievement is possible and would be rewarded but for
coerced equality: quotas, affirmative action, income redistribution
through progressive taxation for some, entitlement programs for
others, and the tyranny of political correctness spreading through
universities, primary and secondary schools, government, and even the
private sector. Radical individualism, on the other hand, is demanded
when there is no danger that achievement will produce inequality and
people wish to be unhindered in the pursuit of pleasure. This finds
expression particularly in the areas of sexuality and violence, and
their vicarious enjoyment in popular entertainment.
Individualism and egalitarianism do not always divide the labor of
producing cultural decay. Often enough they collaborate. When
egalitarianism reinforces individualism, denying the possibility that
one culture or moral view can be superior to another, the result is
cultural and moral relativism, whose end products include
multiculturalism, sexual license, obscenity in the popular arts, an
unwillingness to punish crime adequately and, sometimes, even to
convict the obviously guilty. Both the individualist and the
egalitarian (usually in the same skin) are antagonistic to society's
traditional hierarchies or lines of authority-the one because his
pleasures can be maximized only by freedom from authority, the other
because he resents any distinction among people or forms of behavior
that suggests superiority in one or the other.
The universality of these forces is indicated by the fact that they
are prominent features of two institutions at opposite ends of the
cultural spectrum: the Supreme Court of the United States and rock
music.
The Court reflects modern cultural trends most obviously when it
invents new rights of the individual against the decisions of the
political community, but it also does so in the expansion of rights
expressed in the Constitution beyond anything the drafters and
ratifiers could have intended. Radical individualism surfaced when the
Court created a right of privacy, supposedly about the sanctity of the
marital bedchamber, which soon explicitly became a right of individual
autonomy unconnected to privacy. Four justices subsequently pronounced
it a "moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor
to society as a whole"-a "fact" which means that a person has no
obligations outside his own skin. The same tendency is seen in the
Court's drive to privatize religion, as when a girl is held to have a
First Amendment right not to have to sit at graduation through a short
prayer because it might offend her sensibilities. The list could be
extended almost indefinitely. The autonomy the Court requires, of
course, is necessarily selective, almost invariably consisting of the
freedoms preferred by modern liberalism.
The Court's commitment to egalitarianism is so strong that it overrode
the explicit language and legislative history of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act to allow preferences for blacks and women. The Court usually
argued that the preferences were for prior discrimination,
discrimination not against the individuals now benefited but against
other members of their race or sex in the past. Even that requirement
was dropped when the Court allowed preferences for minorities in the
grant of station licenses by the Federal Communications Commission,
despite the lack of any evidence that such grants had ever been
tainted by discrimination. In these ways the Court reflects, and hence
illegitimately legitimates, the thrusts of modern liberal culture.
To point the parallel: in a book appropriately titled The Triumph of
Vulgarity, Robert Pattison points out that rock music celebrates the
unconstrained self: "The extrovert, the madman, the criminal, the
suicide, or the exhibitionist can rise to heroic stature in rock for
the same reasons that Byron or Raskolnikov became romantic
heroes-profligacy and murder are expressions of an emotional intensity
that defies the limits imposed by nature and society." Rock culture
teaches egalitarianism as well, not only in its frequent advocacy of
revolution, but in its refusal to make distinctions about morality or
aesthetics based upon any transcendent principle. There is no such
principle, only sensation, energy, the pleasure of the moment, and the
expansion of the self.
Vulgarity and obscenity are, of course, rife in popular culture. Rock
is followed by rap; television situation comedies and magazine
advertising increasingly rely on explicit sex; such cultural icons as
Roseanne Barr and Michael Jackson can be seen on family-oriented
television clutching their crotches. The prospect is for more and
worse. Companies are now doing billions of dollars' worth of business
in pornographic videos, and volume is increasing rapidly. They are
acquiring inventories of the videos for cable television; and a
nationwide chain of pornographic video and retail stores is in the
works. One pay-per-view network operator says, "This thing is a
freight train."
It is likely to become a rocket ship soon if, as George Gilder
predicts, computers replace television, allowing viewers to call up
digital films and files of news, art, and multimedia from around the
world. He dismisses conservatives' fears that "the boob tube will give
way to what H. L. Mencken might have termed a new Boobissimus, as the
liberated children rush away from the network nurse, chasing Pied
Piper pederasts, snuff-film sadists, and other trolls of cyberspace."
Gilder concedes, "Under the sway of television, democratic capitalism
enshrines a Gresham's law; bad culture drives out good, and ultimately
porn and prurience, violence and blasphemy prevail everywhere from the
dimwitted 'news' shows to the lugubrious movies." But he blames that
on the nature of broadcast technology, which requires central control
and reduces the audience to its lowest common denominator of tastes
and responses.
But the computer will give everyone his own channel: "The creator of a
program on a specialized subject-from Canaletto's art to chaos theory,
from GM car transmission repair to cowboy poetry, from Szechuan
restaurant finance to C++ computer codes-will be able to reach
everyone in the industrialized world who shares the interest."
Perhaps. But there seems little reason to think there will not also be
an enormous increase in obscene and violent programs. Many places
already have fifty or more cable channels, including some very good
educational channels, but there are still MTV's music videos, and the
porn channels are coming on line. The more private viewing becomes,
the more likely that salacious and perverted tastes will be indulged.
That is suggested by the explosion of pornographic film titles and
profits when videocassettes enabled customers to avoid going to
"adult" theaters. Another boom should occur when those customers don't
even have to ask for the cassettes in a store. The new technology,
while it may bring the wonders Gilder predicts, will almost certainly
make our culture more vulgar and violent.
The leader of the revolution in pornographic video, referred to
admiringly by a competitor as the Ted Turner of the business, offers
the usual defenses of decadence: "Adults have a right to see
[pornography] if they want to. If it offends you, don't buy it."
Modern liberalism employs the rhetoric of "rights" incessantly to
delegitimize restraints on individuals by communities. It is a
pernicious rhetoric because it asserts a right without giving reasons.
If there is to be anything that can be called a community, the case
for previously unrecognized individual freedoms must be thought
through, and "rights" cannot win every time.
The second notion-"If it offends you, don't buy it"-is both lulling
and destructive. Whether you buy it or not, you will be greatly
affected by those who do. The aesthetic and moral environment in which
you and your family live will be coarsened and brutalized. There are
economists who confuse the idea that markets should be free with the
idea that everything should be on the market. The first idea rests on
the efficiency of the free market in satisfying wants; the second
raises the question of which wants it is moral to satisfy. The latter
question brings up the topic of externalities: you are free not to
make steel, but you will be affected by the air pollution of those who
do make it. To complaints about pornography and violence on
television, libertarians reply, "All you have to do is hit the remote
control and change channels." But, like the person who chooses not to
make steel, you and your family will be affected by the people who do
not change the channel. As Michael Medved puts it, "To say that if you
don't like the popular culture then turn it off, is like saying, if
you don't like the smog, stop breathing. . . . There are Amish kids in
Pennsylvania who know about Madonna." And their parents can do nothing
about that.
Can there be any doubt that as pornography and violence become
increasingly popular and accessible entertainment, attitudes about
marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of
force, and permissible public behavior and language will change, and
with the change of attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public
and private? The contrary view must assume that people are unaffected
by what they see and hear. Advertisers bet billions the other way.
Advocates of liberal arts education assure us those studies improve
character; it is not very likely that only uplifting culture affects
attitudes and behavior. "Don't buy it" and "Change the channel" are
simply advice to accept a degenerating culture and its consequences.
Modern liberalism also presses our politics to the left because
egalitarianism is hostile to the authorities and hierarchies-moral,
religious, social, economic, and intellectual-that are characteristic
of a bourgeois or traditional culture and a capitalist economy. Yet
modern liberalism is not hostile to hierarchy as such. Egalitarianism
requires hierarchy because equality of condition cannot be achieved or
approximated without coercion. The coercers will be bureaucrats and
politicians who will, and already do, form a new elite class.
Political and governmental authority replace the authorities of
family, church, profession, and business. The project is to sap the
strength of these latter institutions so that individuals stand bare
before the state, which, liberals assume with considerable
justification, they will administer. We will be coerced into virtue,
as modern liberals define virtue: a ruthlessly egalitarian society.
This agenda is, of course, already well advanced.
Both diminished performance and personal injustice are accomplished
through radically egalitarian measures. Quotas and affirmative action,
for example, are common and increasing not only in the workplace but
in university admissions, faculty hiring, and promotion. The excuse is
past discrimination, but the result is that individuals who have never
been discriminated against are preferred to individuals who have never
discriminated, regardless of their respective achievements.
Predictably, the result is anger on both sides and an increasingly
polarized society. After years of struggle to emplace the principle of
reward according to achievement, the achievement principle is being
jettisoned for one of reward according to birth once more.
Remarkably little thought attends this process. The demand is always
for more equality, but no egalitarian ever specifies how much equality
will be enough. And so the leveling process grinds insensately on. The
Wall Street Journal recently reprinted a Kurt Vonnegut story, which
the paper retitled "It Seemed Like Fiction" because it was written "in
1961, before the passage of the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights
Act (1964), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Equal
Employment Opportunity Act (1972), the Rehabilitation Act (1973), the
Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the Older Workers' Benefit
Protection Act (1990), and the Civil Rights Act (1991)." At the time
of reprinting, Congress was preparing hearings on "The Employment
Nondiscrimination Act of 1994" and was considering additional
amendments to the Civil Rights Act. Even before all this, Vonnegut saw
the trend and envisioned the day when Americans would achieve perfect
equality: persons of superior intelligence required to wear mental
handicap radios that emit a sharp noise every twenty seconds to keep
them from taking unfair advantage of their brains, persons of superior
strength or grace burdened with weights, those of uncommon beauty
forced to wear masks. Why not?
Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural
elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or
disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches,
Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the
congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional
Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation
staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that
exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So
pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights
of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United
States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do
not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers,
they win more than their share and move the culture always in one
direction.
This is not a conspiracy but a syndrome. These are people who view the
world from a common perspective, a perspective to the left of the
attitudes of the general public. Two explanations for this phenomenon
have been advanced. Both seem accurate. One is a heretical version of
Marxism, a theory of class warfare; the other might be called a
heretical version of religion, a theory of the hunger for
spirituality, for a meaning to life.
Joseph Schumpeter first articulated the idea that capitalism requires
and hence produces a large intellectual class. The members of that
class are not necessarily very good at intellectual work; they are
merely people who work with or transmit ideas at wholesale or retail,
the folks collectively referred to above as the New Class (also known
as the "knowledge class," the "class of semiskilled intellectuals," or
the "chattering class").
Why should the New Class be hostile to traditional or bourgeois
society? The answer, according to the class warfare theory, is that
capitalism bestows its favors, money, and prestige on the business
class. The New Class, filled with resentment and envy, seeks to
enhance its own power and prestige by attacking capitalism, its
institutions, and its morality. It is necessary to attack from the
left because America has never had an aristocratic ethos and because
the weapons at hand are by their nature suited to the left. The ideas
are held not for their merit but because they are weapons.
There is probably a good deal to this, but it seems not quite
sufficient. For one thing, it does not account for the Hollywood left.
These are folks with no need whatever to envy the CEO of General
Motors his prestige or financial rewards. And no one, to my knowledge,
has ever classified Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Ed Asner, and Norman
Lear as intellectuals.
There is, however, an additional theory. Max Weber noted the
predicament of intellectuals in a world from which "ultimate and
sublime values" have been withdrawn: "The salvation sought by an
intellectual is always based on inner need. . . . The intellectual
seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends to infinity, to
endow his life with a pervasive meaning." The subsidence of religion
leaves a void that must be filled. Richard Grenier observes that among
those intellectuals "most subject to longings for meaning, Max Weber
listed, prophetically: university professors, clergymen, government
officials .
. . 'coupon clippers' . . . journalists, school teachers, 'wandering
poets.'" By
"coupon clippers," I take it, Weber meant the generations that inherit
the wealth of the men who made it, which would explain why so many
foundations created by wealthy conservatives become liberal when the
children or grandchildren take over. And for "wandering poets," read
the likes of Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. The epitome of Weber's
university professors is John Rawls, whose egalitarian theory of
justice swept the academy. Among other odd notions, Rawls laid it down
that no inequalities are just unless they benefit the most
disadvantaged members of society. There is, of course, no good reason
for such a rule, and it is a prescription for permanent hostility to
actual societies, and most particularly that of the United States,
which can never operate in that fashion. No vital society could.
What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the
New Left of the 1960s-the New Left that collapsed as a unified
political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense,
single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical
feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical
environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists,
People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil
Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left
did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but
there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables
people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a
general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and
come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of
the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its
goals more attainable, than ever before.
In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and
radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread
and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to
direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal
fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms
are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring
violence and sex. David Frum argues that the root of our trouble is
big government, but the root of big government is the egalitarian
passion, which intimidates even many conservatives. So long as that
passion persists, government is likely only to get bigger and more
intrusive. We sometimes console ourselves with the thought that our
current moral anarchy and statism are merely one phase of a pendulum's
swing, that in time the pendulum will swing the other way. No doubt
such movements and countermovements are often observable, but it is
entirely possible that they are merely ephiphenomena that do not
affect the larger movement of the culture. After each swing the bottom
of the pendulum's arc is always further to the cultural and political
left. Certainly, in the United States, we have never experienced a
period of cultural depravity and governmental intrusiveness to rival
today's condition.
The prospects look bleak, moreover, if we reflect on the sources of
modern liberalism's components. The root of egalitarianism lies in
envy and insecurity, which are in turn products of self-pity, arguably
the most pervasive and powerful emotion known to mankind. The root of
individualism lies in self-interest, not always expressed as a desire
for money but also for power, celebrity, pleasures, and titillations
of all varieties. Western civilization, of course, has been uniquely
individualistic. Envy and self-interest often have socially beneficial
results, but when fully unleashed, freed of constraints, their
consequences are rot, decadence, and statism.
Because they arise out of fundamental human emotions, it is obvious
that individualism and egalitarianism were not invented in the 1960s.
They have been working inexorably through Western civilization for
centuries, perhaps for millennia, but they have only recently overcome
almost all obstacles to their full realization. These forces were
beneficent for most of their careers; they produced the glories of our
civilization and, freed of the restraints of the past, became
malignant only in this century. We are delighted that the restraints
that afflicted men in the classical world, in the Middle Ages, even in
the last century and much of this have been weakened or removed. Our
names for particular events and eras celebrate that movement: the
Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, our own Declaration
of Independence and Bill of Rights, the Civil Rights Movement. Though
they had other complex effects, all involved the loosening of
restraints: religious, legal, and moral. But any progression can at
last go too far.
The constraints that made individualism and egalitarianism beneficial
included economic necessity, which channeled individualism into
productive work, and religion (with its corollaries of morality and
law), which tempered self-interest and envy. It is only in this
century, and particularly in the years since World War II, that
Americans have known an affluence that frees many of us from
absorption with making a living, and it is in that same period that
the decline in religion, which began centuries ago, reached its low
point.
Religious belief remains strong but seems to have a diminishing effect
on behavior. And only lately have we developed the technologies that
not only make work easier but also make the opportunities for
sensation almost boundless. We have always known that unfettered human
nature does not present an attractive face, but it is that face that
is coming into view as modern liberalism progresses. It is difficult
to imagine the constraints that could now be put in place to do the
work that economic necessity and religion once did.
If the drive of modern liberalism cannot be blunted and then reversed,
we are also likely to see an increasingly inefficient economy. The
hedonism of radical individualism is not consistent with the habits of
work and saving that are essential to a vigorous economy. The quotas
and affirmative action that are growing in our educational
institutions and in our corporations, the dilution of the achievement
principle, coupled with the government's determination to intervene in
the economy through manifold regulations, mandates, and taxes, will
place additional burdens on productivity. Despite all we have learned
from watching other economies, perhaps we are fated to repeat the
socialist mistakes and suffer the inevitable consequences.
This is a picture of a bleak landscape, and there are many who
disagree. Optimists point out, for example, that American culture is
complex and resilient, that it contains much that is good and healthy,
that many families continue to raise children with strong moral
values. All that is true. I have been describing trends, not the
overall condition of the culture, but the trends have been running the
wrong way, dramatically so in the past thirty years. It would be
difficult to contend that, the end of racial segregation aside,
American culture today is superior to, or even on a par with, the
culture of the 1950s.
Others might argue that the elections of 1994 are an indication that a
cultural swing is taking place, that Americans have rejected huge,
regulation-happy government. That may be so, but I remember thinking
the same thing in November 1980 when the electorate chose Ronald
Reagan and defeated a clutch of the most liberal Senators. But little
long-term improvement occurred. Government now regulates more than it
did then. It was fifteen years between Reagan's first inauguration and
the Republican domination of Congress. We will know that a sea change
has happened if, fifteen years from now, government is smaller, less
expensive, and less intrusive.
Modern liberalism, moreover, maintains its hold on the institutions
that shape values and manipulate symbols. Hollywood and the network
evening news will not change their ways because of Republican
majorities. Political correctness and multiculturalism will not be
ejected from the universities by Newt Gingrich. If the reaction of the
left to Reagan's elections is any guide, modern liberalism will become
more aggressive and intolerant. In any event, even a persistently
conservative government can do little to deal with social
deterioration other than stop subsidizing it through welfare, and it
remains to be seen whether Republicans have the will to overcome the
constituencies that want welfare. Moral decay is evident, moreover,
among people who are not on welfare and never will be.
No one can be certain of the future, of course. Cultures in decline
have, unpredictably, turned themselves around before. Perhaps ours
will too. Perhaps, ultimately, we will become so sick of the moral and
aesthetic environment that is growing in America that stricter
standards will be imposed democratically or by moral disapproval.
Perhaps we will reject a government that is controlling more and more
of our lives. A hopeful sign is the degree to which modern liberalism
and its works-political correctness, affirmative action,
multiculturalism, and the like-is coming under intellectual attack,
not merely from conservative but also from liberal intellectuals. If
its intellectual and moral bankruptcy is repeatedly exposed, perhaps
modern liberalism will die of shame.
But then again, perhaps not. Country singer and social philosopher
Merle Haggard, whose perspective is like Irving Kristol's, says that
the decade of the 1960s "was just the evening of it all. I think we're
into the dead of night now." Chances are, that is too optimistic and
the dead of night still lies ahead. For the immediate future, in any
event, what we probably face is an increasingly vulgar, violent,
chaotic, and politicized culture and, unless the conservative
resurgence of 1994 is both long-lasting and effective, an increasingly
incompetent, bureaucratic, and despotic government. Kristol refers to
himself as a cheerful pessimist. If the argument here is even close to
the mark, and if the counterattack falls short, we had all better
start working on the cheerful part.
Robert H. Bork is author of The Tempting of America and is currently
at work on Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American
Decline, scheduled for publication by Regan Books, an imprint of
HarperCollins. An earlier version of this essay appeared in The
Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, edited
by Christopher DeMuth and William Kristol (AEI Press).
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9506/dinoia.html
------------------------------------------------------
Jesus and the World Religions
J. A. Di Noia
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 24-28.
Is Jesus Christ the unique mediator of salvation? I was one of five
panelists assigned to address this question at a recent meeting of
Catholic theologians. I was the first to speak and, as it turned out,
the only panelist prepared to advance an unqualified affirmative
response to the question. Why is this? Why would a group of Catholic
theologians decline to affirm what, until recently, would have been
considered an unquestionable tenet of ecumenical Christian faith?
As the session unfolded, it became clear that their reluctance to do
so was motivated at least in part by a desire to avoid giving offense
to religious people of other traditions. The underlying premise of
their remarks and of the ensuing discussion seemed to be this: To
ascribe a uniquely salvific role to Jesus Christ would constitute a
denial of the salvific role of other religious founders (like the
Buddha and Muhammad) and thus would be an affront to their
communities.
The way that many theologians think about this issue has been
influenced by the pluralist theology of religions popularized by John
Hick, Paul Knitter, and others. Indeed, Paul Knitter was one of the
panelists at the session mentioned above. In a nutshell, pluralists
claim that in one way or another all religions aim at salvation. In
John Hick's influential definition, salvation is the movement from
self-centeredness to "Reality-centeredness." Since, according to
pluralists, ultimate Reality is incomprehensible and ineffable, no one
religious description can claim primacy over rival descriptions, and
no tradition can claim exclusive rights to the means of salvation.
In the pluralist perspective, therefore, each religious founder must
be regarded as in some sense a savior. Exclusive or unique status with
respect to the knowledge of, provision for, or access to, salvation
can no more be claimed for Jesus of Nazareth than it can be claimed
for Gautama the Buddha or for Muhammad. Naturally, pluralists do not
deny that these founders were unique historical personalities. What
they deny is that any one of them could provide a uniquely privileged
or exclusive access to salvation.
It follows for pluralists that Christian theologians cannot give a
simple affirmative answer to the question, Is Jesus Christ the unique
mediator of salvation? On the basis of their study of religious
traditions, pluralist philosophers and theologians contend that
salvation, though diversely mediated, is nonetheless universally
accessible. It is not just in order to avoid giving offense to other
religious people that pluralists have championed this view. Pluralists
argue on empirical and philosophical grounds that a soteriological
structure underlies all religious traditions and thus variously
orients their adherents to "Reality" as it is diversely figured in
these traditions. Only in this way can Christian theologians affirm
the universality of salvation and of religious truth, at least as
possibilities, without giving offense to other religious people.
To be sure, pluralists are not the only theologians who have been
concerned with the salvation of persons who are not Christians.
According to the typology prevailing in current theology of religions,
the chief alternative positions on this issue are represented by
exclusivism and inclusivism. In contrast to pluralists, both
exclusivists and inclusivists would have no difficulty in giving an
affirmative answer to the question, Is Jesus Christ the unique
mediator of salvation? For all their sharp differences, exclusivists
and inclusivists concur in their avowal of the uniquely salvific role
of Christ. But exclusivists deny the possibility of salvation for non-
Christians who do not before death explicitly profess faith in Christ.
Inclusivists, on the other hand, allow for the possibility of
salvation chiefly on the grounds of some form of implicit faith in
Christ, combined with a morally upright life, on the part of
non-Christians.
The Christian concern not to give offense to other religious people is
a praiseworthy one, while the concern to allow for the possibility of
their salvation is a doctrinally crucial one. But suppose that, far
from being an affront to other religious traditions, a strong
Christian affirmation of the uniqueness of Christ's salvific role were
fundamental to traditional Christian universalism. Suppose, in other
words, that the particularity of salvation in Christ were
nonexclusive. Suppose, further, that an affirmation of this
nonexclusive particularity of salvation in Christ were not an obstacle
to but a condition for genuine respect for other religious people.
This position, which I have long argued for, rests not only on central
Christian doctrines but also on the suggestion that "salvation" is not
a term that encompasses what all religions seek, but is a properly
Christian designation for that which should be sought above all else
in life. Salvation has a distinctively Christian content:
transformation in Christ with a view to ultimate communion with the
triune God. Even where other religious communities employ the term
"salvation," their conceptions of the aim of life differ from one
another and from that espoused by Christian communities. By framing
the agenda of theology of religions primarily in terms of the
possibility of extra-Christian salvation, pluralists and inclusivists
often fail to give enough weight to the specificity and
distinctiveness of religious aims. Inclusivists fail to notice their
distinctiveness because they tend to reinterpret non-Christian
patterns and aims in Christian terms. More at the center of attention
here, however, are pluralists who make salvation an all- encompassing
designation for the variety of aims that religious traditions espouse
and commend.
If the issues at stake were framed differently, it might turn out that
to affirm Christ's unique role in salvation is not to exclude persons
who are not Christians but to embrace them. In other words, it might
turn out that we could give a strong affirmative answer to the
question, Is Jesus Christ the unique mediator of salvation? and still
both show respect for other religious people and include them in the
final consummation of all things for which we have reason, only in
Christ, to hope.
In order to reframe these issues, and at the same time to identify
what seems to be the weakness especially of typical pluralist
approaches to them, let us engage in an experiment. Let us compare the
question, Is Jesus Christ the unique mediator of salvation? with the
question, Is the Buddha the unique revealer of the Dharma?
Suppose that I pose this second question to a Buddhist friend. Along
with most other Buddhists, she will answer it affirmatively. The
Dharma comprises all that concerns Nirvana and its attainment. Even
though Buddhists commonly insist that knowledge of the Dharma is in
principle accessible to anyone, still they regard Gautama's discovery
and teaching of the Dharma as unique in this era.
Consider how the conversation might proceed at this point. If my
Buddhist friend should caution me that I will never attain Nirvana by
following the course of life laid out for me by the Christian
community, I do not feel anxious about this. I have not been persuaded
that seeking Nirvana is what I should be doing. If I did begin to be
persuaded of this, then I should undertake to discover the path and
try to make my way along it. I would, in other words, have begun to be
a follower of the Buddha. I might even then join a Buddhist community,
or at least become an inquirer. Some Catholics I know have done this
very thing. But if I continue to be convinced that it is salvation
that I should be seeking and that Christ is the unique mediator of
this salvation, then I would continue on the Christian path.
One thing to notice about this hypothetical encounter between me and
my Buddhist friend is that I have not felt affronted by her warning
that I shall not attain Nirvana unless I follow the Excellent
Eightfold Path taught uniquely by the Buddha. On the contrary, my
initial reaction is that what she has said to me makes perfect sense.
If the Excellent Eightfold Path is the way to Nirvana, and if I do not
choose to pursue this path, then it follows that I may not reach
Nirvana. But, since I have as yet no desire to attain and enjoy
Nirvana, I am not offended by this reasoning. I have not been
persuaded that Nirvana is what I should be seeking.
Without trying to field a "definition" of religion-something that has
proven notoriously difficult to do-we could say that the Christian
community and the Buddhist community (with their various
subcommunities) each seems to have some conception of an ultimate aim
of life and has developed a pattern of life geared toward attaining
it. Other major religious communities share this tendency as well.
What is ultimate, whether it be a transcendent agent or an as yet
unrealized state of being, invades life at every moment, and summons
the community's members to order and shape their lives in view of this
aim. The world's religious communities differ in their descriptions of
the aims that are ultimate in this sense (e.g., the extinction of the
self or communion with the triune God) as well as in their provision
for the cultivation of patterns of life ordered to the attainment and
enjoyment of such aims (e.g., the Dharma or the gospel). But they seem
to agree in espousing and commending comprehensive aims of life, and
in striving to shape the lives of their members with a view to those
aims.
We can now formulate a preliminary result of the consideration of the
hypothetical conversation between me and my Buddhist friend. If the
assertion "The Buddha is the unique revealer of the Dharma" is not
offensive to me, then why should the assertion "Jesus Christ is the
unique mediator of salvation" be offensive to Buddhists, or, for that
matter, to Muslims, Vedantists, or Jews? A rabbi once said to me,
revealingly: "Jesus Christ is the answer to a question I have never
asked." This remark suggests that we might be on the right track in
our reflections. Salvation in the Christian sense, it implies, is not
what the rabbi is seeking. Asking the question to which Jesus Christ
is the answer commits oneself to an inquiry (logically speaking) that
may lead to the adoption of a Christian way of life. At least in part,
this will mean that what Christians aim for, as expressed by the
umbrella term "salvation," has begun to look appealing or even
ultimately important. One might conclude: This is what I should be
aiming for in my life. But what would this be?
When Christians try to answer this question, we find ourselves
becoming quite specific. When we try to say what comprises salvation,
we find ourselves talking about the triune God; the incarnation,
passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; grace, sin, and
justification; transfiguration and divinization; faith, hope, and
charity; the commandments and the moral virtues; and many other
characteristically Christian things as well. We should not be
surprised if, in trying to answer a cognate question, a member of
another religious community, say a Buddhist, should also become very
specific about Nirvana and all that bears on its attainment. We should
not be surprised, furthermore, if the descriptions of salvation and
Nirvana do not coincide. But, for the moment, let us continue the
experiment by sketching some of the things that a Christian
description of salvation might have to include.
Allowing for variations across its various subcommunities, we can
understand the ecumenical Christian community to teach that the
ultimate aim of life is a communion of life-a communion of life with
the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. According to
ecumenical Christian faith, this is a truth proclaimed by Christ and a
destiny made possible for us by his passion, death, and resurrection.
This is what Christians mean by salvation: the term embraces both the
goal of ultimate communion and the empowerment to attain and enjoy it.
Human beings are called to nothing less than communion with the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and with each other in them. Indeed,
Christianity affirms that the triune God could not bring about a more
intimate union with created persons than that which has already been
initiated in baptism and will be fulfilled for us in Christ. Ultimate
communion involves nothing less than becoming part of the trinitarian
family. The principle and agent of this communion for us is Christ.
Just as Christ is Son by nature-a member of the divine family of the
Trinity in virtue of his being the Son of the Father-so human persons
are to be sons and daughters by adoption. Our fellowship with Christ
and with each other in him brings us into the divine trinitarian
family.
But if we are destined to enjoy this ultimate communion, then we must
change. We must become fit for it. Interpersonal communion with God is
only "natural" to uncreated persons; for created persons, who are also
sinners, such communion is possible only through justification and
grace. Through the redeeming grace of Christ and, specifically,
through the transformation that this grace makes possible, we are
rendered "fit" participants in the communion of the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Our transformation will be a conformation: the more we
become like Christ, the more surely do we discover our true selves,
the unique persons created by the triune God to share in the divine
life and to enjoy the personal life of the Trinity. As Catholics pray
in one of the Sunday prefaces, "Father . . . You sent him as one like
ourselves, though free from sin, that you might see and love in us
what you see and love in him."
However, this conformation does not amount to a mere conformity. The
conformation to Christ that is the principle of our transformation is
not a mere cloning but the realization of our distinctive and unique
personal identities. This must be so, for otherwise the communion to
which this transformation is directed could not be consummated. The
image of God in us consists precisely in the spiritual capacities for
knowing and loving that make interpersonal communion possible. But
authentic interpersonal communion presupposes the full realization of
the individual persons who enter into it. Thus, if Christ is to be the
principle and pattern of our transformation, in being conformed to him
we must each discover and realize our own unique identities as
persons, and be healed of the sinful dispositions that obstruct the
flourishing of our true selves.
This is the force of the astonishing saying of Christ:
If a man wants to be my disciple, let him deny himself and take up
his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will
lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For
what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his
life? Or what will he give in return for his life? (Matthew
16:24-26)
None of us, whether as teachers, parents, or pastors-no matter how
inflated our conceptions of ourselves or how confident our sense of
our abilities-would ever dare to say to anybody in our charge that
they will find their true selves by imitating us. In effect, Christ
asserts that an indefinite number of human persons will find their
distinctive identities by being conformed to Christ. A moment's
reflection shows us that only the Son of God could make such an
assertion. No mere human could do so. Only the inexhaustibly rich
perfect Image of God who is the Person of the Son in a human nature
could constitute the principle and pattern for the transformation and
fulfillment of every human person who has ever lived.
When Christians affirm that Jesus Christ is the unique mediator of
salvation, something like the above can stand as a summary of what
they mean. Leave aside for a moment the question whether such a
description includes or excludes persons who are not Christians. What
we need to consider first, as we continue to reflect on my
hypothetical conversation with a Buddhist friend, is whether such a
description of what Christians mean by salvation is offensive to
persons who are not Christians-Buddhists, for example. Informed of
what a Christian means by salvation, would there be reason for a
Buddhist to feel excluded by the assertion that Jesus Christ is the
unique mediator of salvation?
We have seen that salvation has a specific content for Christians: It
entails an interpersonal communion, made possible by Christ, between
human persons and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At least at first
sight, this seems to be something very different from what Buddhists
can be supposed to be seeking when they follow the Excellent Eightfold
Path that leads them on the way to realizing enlightenment and the
extinction of self in Nirvana. At least on the face of things, what
Buddhists mean by "Nirvana" and what Christians mean by "salvation" do
not seem to coincide. This does not mean that they are opposed; it
remains to be seen whether seeking salvation and seeking Nirvana are
complementary to each other or related in some as yet unspecified
manner. However, it seems clear that interpersonal communion is a very
different thing from the extinction of the self entailed in Nirvana.
Many forms of Buddhism are concerned to cultivate dispositions that
increasingly unmask the illusoriness of personal identity. As noted
above, however, Christians understand personal identity to be of
permanent, indeed eternal, significance because eternity centrally
involves interpersonal communion.
Let us return to my hypothetical conversation with a Buddhist friend.
We left the conversation at the point when she cautioned me that I
would not reach Nirvana unless I followed the Excellent Eightfold
Path. But this warning was not disturbing to me, for I do not want to
attain Nirvana. Suppose that when the conversation resumes I offer a
description of what Christians mean by salvation, a description not
unlike the one presented above. Would we be surprised to find that my
Buddhist friend wants no part of this? It is difficult for us to
understand and accept that what we regard as most important-more so
than anything else, absolutely speaking-other religious people
challenge or repudiate. Buddhist communities in all their variety
possess highly ramified teachings about the true aim of life and about
the means to attain it. These teachings do not, at least on the
surface, coincide with what Christians teach about these matters.
Buddhists do not want ultimate communion; they do not seek it, and,
insofar as they think about it, they may regard us as misguided for
wanting and seeking it. For, by wanting and seeking ultimate
communion, we remain, from a Buddhist point of view, incorrigibly
attached to the very conceptions of personal identity that constitute
the chief obstacle on the way to Nirvana.
Gautama the Buddha is the authority on these matters. He discovered
and taught the Dharma, and through it attained enlightenment. His role
in revealing the Dharma to others is regarded by most of his followers
as something original, at least in the pres-ent epoch. Hence, while it
makes good sense for Buddhists to affirm that the Buddha is the unique
revealer of the Dharma, it makes little sense for them to be offended
when Christians describe Jesus Christ as the unique mediator of
salvation. Buddhists regard Christian beliefs about this as misguided
and perhaps only partially true, but they will not be anxious or
offended by such a Christian affirmation. They are not interested in
seeking and attaining salvation as Christians understand it.
To be sure, some people-pluralists in particular-want to define
"salvation" so broadly that it includes both what Christians mean by
it and what Buddhists mean by Nirvana. On this account of things, my
hypothetical encounter with a Buddhist friend would not present either
of us with a choice between seeking Nirvana and seeking salvation.
Some would say that to think that there is a serious choice here is,
religiously speaking, overly literalistic and even simpleminded.
Indeed, pluralists contend, precisely at this juncture the superiority
of pluralist theology of religions is displayed. Pluralists argue that
all religious communities advance their members toward specific aims-
communion or enlightenment, as the case may be-that are surpassed or
transcended by a more ultimate, but indescribable, aim. All religious
communities seek this yet more ultimate aim with varying degrees of
clarity and success. Not only is this conception closer to the truth
of the matter, it also provides the basis for the sympathetic
understanding, fruitful dialogue, and mutual respect that are
desperately needed today.
In fact, however, this basic premise of pluralist theology of
religions will not stand up under close scrutiny. Even if religious
communities were prepared to accept some such description of what they
are about it still remains true that they espouse and commend specific
aims that differ from one another.
Furthermore, these specific aims call forth distinctive patterns of
life in each of the major religious traditions and in local traditions
as well. Certain kinds of life are understood to foster the enjoyment
of certain kinds of ends of life, and others to obstruct this
enjoyment. This seems to be an ineradicable feature of the
characteristic discourse and ethos of most religious communities.
Individual lives come to be shaped by the ultimate aims that are
sought. So even if the true aim of life were one that transcended the
particular aims of all religious traditions, no one could seek it. No
one could undertake to order life in such a way as to attain and enjoy
an ultimate aim of life of which no description could be given.
But this goes directly against the grain of characteristic religious
affirmation and conviction. Religious people, by and large, believe
themselves to be in possession of understandings, incomplete though
they may be, of what is ultimately important in life and how to orient
life in its direction.
Significant disagreements obtain among the major and local religious
traditions about these matters. Pluralist theology of religions does
not so much explain these disagreements as explain them away. In this
way, pluralism seems to offer a massive redescription, rather than an
interpretation, of religious beliefs and practices, and of the
arresting differences among them.
Thus the following statements are not problematic in the way that many
people, like those I joined on the theological panel, seem to think.
"Jesus Christ is the unique mediator of salvation" and "The Buddha is
the unique revealer of the Dharma." Were representatives of Christian
or Buddhist communities to retreat from advancing such claims, it is
not clear what they would have to offer to the world. There would be
no compelling, or even interesting, reasons to persevere in membership
in these communities, or indeed to seek it.
The great challenge facing present-day Christian theology of religions
and interreligious conversation is to avoid minimizing the distinctive
features of the major religious traditions through a well-intentioned
universalism. Christian confidence in the universal scope of salvation
rests on convictions about the historical career and perduring agency
of Jesus Christ. Only if his identity is affirmed in its fullness-in
accord with the holy Scripture, the great councils, and the Church's
liturgy-as the Son of God who became man and died for us can the hope
of Christians for themselves and for others be sustained. "For in him
all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was
pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by
making peace through the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:19-20).
If the salvation that the triune God wills for the entire human race
entails ultimate communion with the three persons, then the creaturely
and sinful obstacles to this communion must be overcome. It has never
been claimed that anyone but Jesus Christ could overcome these
obstacles. Through him we are both healed and raised to an adoptive
participation in the life of the Trinity. The obstacles to this
participation are either overcome or not. If they are not overcome,
then Christians have nothing for which to hope, for themselves or for
others. In that case, they will hawk an empty universalism on the
highways of the world. When Christians abandon the proclamation of
Christ's unique mediatorship, they have no other mediatorship with
which to replace it.
How persons who are not now explicit believers in Christ are to share
in the salvation he alone makes possible is a large topic that I have
not addressed here. But if Christians no longer confess Christ's
unique mediatorship in making ultimate communion a real possibility
for created persons, then the problem of how non-Christians can share
in it is not resolved: it simply evaporates. True Christian
universalism depends on the affirmation of the nonexclusive
particularity of salvation in Jesus Christ.
J. A. Di Noia, O.P., teaches at the Dominican House of Studies in
Washington, D.C., and is author of The Diversity of Religions: A
Christian Perspective. A slightly different version of this essay
appears in Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, Carl E. Braaten and
Robert W. Jenson, eds., just published by Eerdmans.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9506/sisk.html
----------------------------------------------------
Living with Numbers
John P. Sisk
Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 54 (June/July 1995): 34-37.
After suffering through elementary arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and
trigonometry it is easy to believe with the Pythagoreans that
everything is number, or with St. Matthew that "the very hairs of your
head are numbered." Inclined as they were to be mystic about their
numbers, the Pythagoreans would have found Matthew as easy to adapt to
their ontology as the announcement of Psalm 147 that the Lord not only
"telleth the number of the stars" but "calleth them by name." We are
as immersed in our intricately numbered cosmos as is a fish in its
water. The fish, of course, does not have to suffer the awareness of
the alienating disjunction between itself and its cosmos, which would
be the case if it had the capacity to do grade school arithmetic.
The Pythagoreans had no way of determining the number of hairs on
one's head, to say nothing of one's blood pressure, but they surely
would have agreed with Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984 that "Freedom is
the freedom to say that two plus two equals four." They had that faith
in the wonderfully ordered multiplicity of the cosmos that we find in
those poets who have not yet succumbed to a more relativistic
mathematics. Thus Wordsworth in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" sees
beside a lake ten thousand golden daffodils and compares them to "the
stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way."
But then we might expect the poet to be at home with numbers if we
remember the traditional association of the art of poetry with numbers
in the sense of the structured and melodious flow of stressed and
unstressed syllables. When poetry was referred to as numbers it was
still easy for poets and their readers to believe that the grand model
for the successful poem was the universe itself. When Wordsworth
associates the fluttering and dancing of ten thousand daffodils with
the twinkling of implied thousands of stars in the milky way, one set
of numbers repeats and reinforces the other. The important thing is
not the accuracy of the count but the fact that daffodils and stars
are countably there in a cosmos that supports the poet's perception of
a true relationship between them, and his expectation that when the
conditions are right the experience will recur. In Wordsworth's poem
there is no threat in the big numbers, as in another context there
might very well be. This is because this reference is less to sheer
numbers than to admirable variety.
I suspect that the number-minded Pythagoreans could have accommodated
themselves to Wordsworth's phenomenology but not to that of their
fellow Greek, Diogenes. The latter had been run out of his native
Sinope because as a devaluator of the currency he had shown a lack of
respect for the economic numbering system upon which a community
depends for its social and economic well-being. Established in his tub
at Athens, he brought together in his life and writings the cynic and
skeptic attitudes that subsequently made him a hero for many of those
who experience life not as a pleasant and purposefully ordered variety
but as sheer numbers in a world that is too much with them. He was a
true minimalist for whom the cosmos was afflicted by too much of
everything, especially people; indeed, he anticipated Sartre's
definition of hell as other people.
Diogenes also anticipated those holy reductionists about whom Helen
Waddell writes so memorably in The Desert Fathers. "These men, by the
exaggeration of their lives," she says of the North African ascetics,
"stamped infinity on the imagination of the West." They devaluated the
clock time of the abstractly numbered cosmos by contrasting it with
the unity and simplicity of eternity. Paradoxically, Waddell says,
they ended up giving time unplumbed depths. One might say too that
they helped to preserve an episteme in which centuries later William
Blake in his "Auguries of Innocence" could aspire
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.
Nevertheless, the Fathers also helped to institutionalize that
uneasiness in the presence of the abundant variety of God's universe
that has always nagged at the Christian West. If they had learned to
see heaven in a wild flower (the best of them could) they would have
been less likely to fall (as a few of them did) into the hands of the
Gnostics for whom all grains of sand and all wild flowers were part of
the numbers racket of the evil Demiurge.
But even for Wordsworth the wonderfully various world of the golden
daffodils that was so compatible with the magic of poetic numbers had
its menacing and defining contrast: the City with its hordes of other
people becoming ever more dependent on and alienated by nature-abusing
technology, attention-distracting media, and freak-show entertainment.
Progressively throughout the speeded-up nineteenth century the need to
feel meaningfully at home in the cosmos is threatened by the sheer
numbers that have resulted from the effort to understand that cosmos
and exploit its energies. In The Prelude Wordsworth has not lost his
connections with the ten thousand golden daffodils, but his encounter
in Book Seven with Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield gives him a grimly
countering image of the blank confusion that "the mighty City is
herself, / To thousands upon thousands of her sons." There are moments
when he sounds as certain as any Desert Father that the world, as he
puts it in one of his best sonnets, "is too much with us."
A bit later in "Dover Beach" Matthew Arnold has not given up hope that
literature would do for him the ordering work that religious faith had
once done. For Arnold the world which seems "To lie before us like a
land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new," is actually
"swept with alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies
clash by night." He could be speaking for us a century later when,
thanks to advances in physics, geology, astronomy, biology, and
transportation, Wordsworth's ten thousand is no longer a very big
number-whether we are thinking about the milky way, our genetic
makeup, the 95,000 miles of fiber-optic cable laid along the
information superhighway, or the national debt.
Before Arnold's century was over, Darwin showed that within the
apparently hit-and-miss abundance of life a purposeful structural
force was at work. To some this was a benign force rich with the
expectation that in due time science might relieve humans of the
burden of sheer numbers. Secular optimists were quick to see a grand
unifying theory in the conjunction of Marx and Darwin. Marx, in fact,
would have dedicated the first volume of Capital to Darwin if the
latter had permitted him to. Tennyson, however, was one of those for
whom Darwin had revealed not the sweet and ordered variety of nature
but its wasteful profusion. So in "In Memoriam" he is appalled at a
nature that is "So careful of the type" and yet "So careless of the
single life . . . that of fifty seeds / She often brings but one to
bear." The irony (and perhaps it was some comfort to him) is that he
was able to contrast the disorder of evolution with the neat quatrains
of his poetic numbers. John Stuart Mill, who credited Wordsworth's
poetry with reclaiming him from a world of sheer numbers, might have
appreciated that irony.
The fifty-to-one odds against the single life that appalled Tennyson
can seem generous enough now. Suppose he had to live with the
knowledge that the sperm that impregnates the ovum is the lone
survivor among the 400 million that were ejaculated with it.
Biologists have good reason to believe that the wasteful disproportion
between the winner and the losers is a life-fostering one. When we
factor in the knowledge that the existence of the winner's parents was
determined by the same statistics, the odds against any particular
single life's appearance in the cosmos are as astronomic as the
prevention of its appearance by abortion is appalling.
God, speaking to Moses from the burning bush, can identify Himself as
"I am who am." All Moses and the mortal rest of us can say is: "Thanks
to You, I am only by the skin of my teeth." Even Nietzsche, whose
habit before madness claimed him was to speak as if from a burning
bush, had to become what he was, whereas God is beyond becoming. No
doubt it is this sense of the utter precariousness of the single life
that prompts us to celebrate the miracle of its improbable appearance.
But at the same time our sense of the improbability of its appearance
can only reinforce our creaturely apprehension that in the lottery of
life the odds are enormously against us. Perhaps his hypersensitivity
to the hazards of existence was an important factor in Calvin's
doctrine of salvation through unearned and irresistible grace. What
better way to counter the despair of the single life's sense of
powerless anonymity?
Those among its eleven million users who have not already found in
Prozac a relief from the pains of being mere numbers in the cosmos
might find a more spectacular anodyne where Walt Whitman found it. In
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" the poet, becoming sick and
tired of the scientist's charts and diagrams, "wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, / Look'd up in
perfect silence at the stars." The stars did for him what they did for
Kant, who claimed to be moved to inexpressible awe by two things: the
starry sky above and the moral law within. At these moments Whitman
and Kant are on the side of the astrologer, who assures his or her
believers that the single life is a matter of benevolent concern to
the apparently inscrutable heavens. Even the most obdurate ascetic
minimalist is not likely to complain about the number and remoteness
of the stars when their dazzling presence aloft makes him forget that
there is no safety in numbers.
Still there are those for whom such cosmic optimism does not begin to
alleviate the cosmic anxieties aroused by the overawing big numbers
with which the Hubble telescope is involved. Built at a cost of $1.5
billion (its repairs cost another $690 million), it was expected to
see galaxies beginning to form ten billion light years away and gather
information about quasars, black holes, and the swirling storms of
Jupiter. Perhaps in time it will even locate the astral abode of those
pagan Goddesses who have lately been reported to be doing more for
their devotees than Christian Guardian Angels ever did.
Michael Foucault would have been less interested in the possibility
that the Hubble might someday locate heaven out there in the wide blue
yonder than in the fact that it was a cosmic panopticon. The
panopticon he would have had in mind, to judge from his Discipline and
Punish, was the one planned by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, whose
positivist hopes for a better world were grounded on the conviction
that the true measure of human happiness was the greatest good for the
greatest number. Bentham expected to achieve this condition (no
computers being available) by way of a "felicific calculus" that would
balance pains with pleasures. His panopticon, a necessary but
never-realized part of his plans for prison reform, would have made it
possible for a single but invisible observer, using a series of
reflectors, to keep all prisoners under surveillance at all times for
the good of themselves and society.
The totalitarian state, being panoptic in its bones, is threatened by
nothing more than the single life's impulse to privacy. This is the
threat that impels Orwell's Big Brother to imprison Ingsoc within a
censoring virtual reality and control it from his panoptic
perspective. At the same time he has to be an atheist lest his
autonomy be preempted by God's panoptic view. No doubt it was the same
fear that made it necessary for Nietzsche to kill off God. How could
he ever be everything he could be in the Hubble-like surveillance of
that eye in the sky?
Unfortunately there remains the Hubble effect: the more he can see,
the greater the epistemological burden for the controller and the
greater the odds for the controlled single life that the sweet variety
of the cosmos will become sheer and undifferentiated numbers.
Thoreau, our own Desert Father, was no less bothered than Wordsworth
by the Hubble effect in the post-Enlightenment world. In Walden, in,
appropriately, the chapter on economy, he is fascinated by the "busk"
as it is practiced by certain savage nations. A busking is an act of
purification in which the old, the excessive, the worn out, and the
discredited are piled up in a public square and burned in anticipation
of a new and refreshed life. For Thoreau the busk is a ritual way of
living with the threat of big numbers-those numbers he saw menacingly
at work in the railroad, the telegraph and the cable. "I say," he
advises, "let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your
accounts on your thumb nail." His good luck was that he did not have
to compete with the digital computer's thousand or so arithmetical
operations per second. No doubt economic minimalists like Diogenes and
St. Paul the Hermit would have agreed: life in the Egyptian desert or
in an Athenian tub is itself a busking life committed to the paradox
that less is more. Humans spend a great deal of time, energy, and
money on such buskings as revolutions, insurrections, wars to end war,
jihads, ethnic cleansings, and holocausts. Indeed, number-reducing
buskers like Savonarola, Genghis Khan, Chairman Mao, Stalin, and
Hitler might have contended that they were only imitating nature in
its tough-minded willingness to sacrifice 400 million sperm in the
interest of an authentic single life.
The extent to which such buskings are themselves contaminated by a
hatred of life in all its various and burdensome abundance-not simply
as it may be at a particular place and time but everywhere and all the
time-is the theme of Hawthorne's story "Earth's Holocaust." Here
aroused and perfectionist reformers, seeing the wide world
"overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery .
. . have determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire." This
busking
takes place on a broad western prairie where everything that for
better or worse is involved with the ongoing business of civilization
is thrown into the flames-everything, that is, except the human heart,
which, as a sardonic observer notes, is quite capable of bringing back
the old defective world. The joyous orgy suggests that the buskers are
really motivated by a Gnostic desire to destroy the evil and
number-infatuated Demiurge that created the obscene and cluttered mess
of the world to begin with. Hawthorne observes this folly with the
same irony that makes his later Blithedale Romance such a memorable
depiction of American millennialism. And certainly his buskers deserve
high marks for the Thoreauean simplicity of their procrustean program.
As for Thoreau himself, one can well imagine how he might have reacted
had he read Robert D. Kaplan's article "The Coming Anarchy" in the
February 1994 Atlantic, with its prediction that in the next half
century "the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more
than nine billion." Under such circumstances the celibate Thoreau, in
whose ascetic arithmetic subtraction took priority over addition and
multiplication, could expect about as much privacy at Walden as at the
Superbowl.
Bentham too was an ardent busker. The felicific calculus by which he
hoped to determine the greatest good for the greatest number would
have to be purged of those fictitious entities of language known as
poetry. "All poetry," he said, "is misrepresentation," which meant
that it was a prime subject for epistemological economy in an already
badly overcrowded universe. He needed to dispose of poetry for the
same reason that Lenin needed to dispose of religion, there being no
place for it in the Marxian felicific calculus.
Thanks to the time-bound nature of the human condition, theorizing and
busking are complementary activities. If you are possessed by the
theoretic worldview of the Abbot Paul, your despising of the world
will in effect be a busking of it, just as your view of it will be
restrictively panoptic. In fact, the desert in our culture has always
been available as a powerful model of a busked state of affairs in
contrast with fragmented city-based culture. In the minimalized utopia
of the desert the simplest arithmetic is enough; there, you can keep
your accounts on your thumbnail.
What Diogenes thought about poetry is not recorded but his combination
of cynicism and skepticism makes it likely that he would have agreed
with Bentham. Now we see the same reductive combination at work in
some of our most absolutist postmodernists. If with their rhetorical
sophistries they can induce enough people to believe that poems are
only self-referential and rife with self-engendered paradoxes, that
poetry- making selves are only fictions, then they will surely reduce
the number of selves in the world-and God knows how much trouble is
caused in the world by those who take themselves seriously as selves.
If at the same time the postmodernists can induce us to moderate our
passion for certainty, then much that we currently value as
life-enhancing variety will be seen as disposable sideshow. The result
could be a grand therapeutic busking that will save us from the
embarrassments we are doomed to when we are tempted by our naive
simplicities to go lusting after the stars.
We can see in Diogenes the always attractive image of the philosopher
as a man whose panoptic and unifying view of past, present, and future
makes him immune to the surprises that afflict the mortal rest of us.
Surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, is the consequence of variety and
contrast; without them there is only the sheer numerosity of being,
the Hubble effect at its epistemological worst when unity is the
result of a censoring that leaves one blind to all distinctions.
No doubt the need to believe in the possibility of invulnerability to
surprise leads us to see such invulnerability where it does not
exist-in Thoreau, for instance, whose encounter with the cosmos, for
all his ascetic denials, turned out to be one surprising development
after another.
In any event, the poet's way of knowing is surprise-dependent, and
when the poet is beyond surprise, having perhaps through an atrophy of
powers or a loss of nerve learned how to practice the comforts of
self- repetition, he is poet no more. This is not the way it was with
Wordsworth when in his lonely wandering he saw in a single glance
those ten thousand golden daffodils in an ontological relationship
with the twinkling stars of the milky way and knew instantly that the
surprise of it would stand against those inevitable moments when the
variety of his world, having shown itself as less than sweet, was only
numbers without end.
John P. Sisk is Professor of English Emeritus at Gonzaga University in
Spokane, Washington, and author, most recently, of Being Elsewhere
(Eastern Washington University Press).