Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness

By Benjamin R. Barber
World Affairs Journal

Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy—to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself.

The common thread that winds through these two stories is the erosion of national autonomy—and, with it, the state’s monopoly over violence, the power to enact binding laws, and other essential aspects of sovereignty. Sovereignty, in turn, is an obvious precondition for democracy (which you cannot have without a state). When the sovereign state erodes, democracy erodes. It is that simple—and, beset from within and without, it is happening even today.

There is, to begin with, an accelerating process of internal disintegration—and the engine, consumerism, that drives it. Critics such as David Riesman, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Baudrillard have been writing about conspicuous consumption, keeping up with the Joneses, outer-directed men in gray flannel suits, the dialectic of enlightenment and one-dimensional men since the end of World War II. The story is by now well chronicled: Productivist capitalism, molded by a Protestant ethos conducive to work, investment, deferred gratification, and service, has long since given way to consumerist capitalism, defined by an ethos of infantilization conducive to laxity, impetuousness, narcissism, and consumption. Where once Americans worked harder than almost any other people, today pop commentators such as Thomas Friedman can worry about the “quiet crisis” in which the tendency to “extol consumption over hard work, investment and long-term thinking” creates an America whose vaunted productivity is in decline and where kids “get fat, dumb, and lazy,” squandering the very moral capital the Protestant culture once promoted and sustained. Tellingly, President Bush after 9/11 did not invite Americans to sacrifice or work hard in order to defeat terrorism; he invited them to go shopping.

In the civic realm, meanwhile, hostility to the commonwealth has intensified since the early 1950s, when social science critics such as David B. Truman insisted there was no need to take account of the common good in discussing public interest “because there is no such thing as the public interest.” Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (the latter asserted that “there is no such thing as society”) were only echoing and reinforcing a powerful skepticism about government and society, a skepticism accompanied in recent years by an astonishing faith in the limitless capacity of markets to “coordinate human behavior or activity with a range and a precision beyond that of any other system, institution, or social process,” as political and economic theorist Charles E. Lindblom has put it.

In this revival of laissez-faire economics and political libertarianism, liberty has acquired an exclusively negative connotation: to be free from. Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist, offered definitive language. Nearly a half century ago, he insisted that “every act of government intervention limits the arena of individual freedom directly and threatens the preservation of freedom indirectly.” Put into practice, what this means for liberty (as Reagan was to argue) is that government is always part of the problem. That belief has encouraged the privatization of any and all government functions, a process that has become a crucial ally of the dominion of consumers.

The problem is that, in the name of abstract personal liberty, libertarians and privatizers actually pervert and undermine real autonomy, given that as Hannah Arendt argued, “political freedom, generally speaking, means the right ‘to be a participant in government,’ or it means nothing.” The tension between private choice and public participation is clearly embodied in the tension between the consumer as private chooser and the citizen as public chooser. Citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because individual desire is not the same thing as common ground; public goods are something more than a collection of private wants. A republic is by definition public, and what is public cannot be determined by aggregating private desires. Asking what “I want” and asking what “we need” are two different things: the first question is ideally answered by the market, the second by the community. When the market is encouraged to do the work of democracy, our culture is deformed and the character of our commonwealth undermined.



In thinking about modernity and modern capitalism, Max Weber spoke a century ago about an iron cage. Consumerism brings to mind a different cage. There is a fiendishly simple method of trapping monkeys in Africa that suggests the paradoxes which confront liberty in this era of consumerism. A small box containing a large nut is affixed to a well-anchored post. The nut can be accessed only through a single, small hole in the box designed to accommodate an outstretched monkey’s grasping paw. Easy to reach in, but when the monkey clasps the nut, impossible to get out. Of course, it is immediately evident to everyone (except the monkey) that all the monkey must do to free itself is let go of its prize. Clever hunters have discovered, however, that they can secure their prey hours or even days later because the monkey—driven by desire—will not release the nut, even until death. Is the monkey free or not?

And what of the consumer? There is of course endless talk about giving people “what they want,” and how the market “empowers” consumers. The market, indeed, does not tell us what to do; it gives us what we want—once it gets through telling us what it is that we want. It promises liberty and happiness while, in truth, delivering neither. More to the point, consumerism encourages a kind of civic schizophrenia, a disorder that divides the citizen into opposing fragments and denies legitimacy to the part that we understand to be “civic” or “public.” The market treats choice as fundamentally private, a matter not of determining some deliberative “we should” but only of enumerating all the “wants” that we harbor as private consumers and creatures of personal desire. Yet private choices inevitably do have social consequences and public outcomes. When these derive from purely personal preferences, the results are often irrational and unintended, at wide variance with the kind of society we might choose through democratic deliberation. Such private choices, though technically “free,” are quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our values and norms. Privatization means the choices we make eventually determine the social outcomes we must suffer together, but which we never directly choose in common.

This explains how a society without villains or conspirators, composed of good-willed but self-seeking individuals, can produce a culture that so many of its members despise. Consumer capitalism does not operate by fielding self-conscious advocates of duplicity. Rather, it generates thinking on the model of the narcissistic child, infantilizing consumers to the point where puerility is not simply an option; it is a mandate. If the attitudes and behaviors that result turn out to undermine cultural values extraneous to capitalism’s concerns—however deeply relevant they may be to moral and spiritual frameworks and to the shape of an ideal public culture—that is too bad. This ethos does not disdain civilization; it is merely indifferent to it. Consumer capitalism encourages individuals to indulge in behavior—however corrupting to civilization—that is useful to consumerism.

Even as an ethos of limitless consumption encourages us to regress, privatization compels us to withdraw from our public selves, to secede from the public square and fence ourselves in behind gated communities, where we deploy private resources to turn what were once public goods, such as garbage collection, police protection, and schooling, into private commodities. What we fail to see is that when public goods are privatized, they are subverted. You cannot protect a few in the midst of general insecurity; you cannot educate a few in the midst of societal ignorance.



Such, in brief, is the story of consumerism and the privatization of sovereignty. The story of globalization is easily as old, marking a dramatic journey that started at the end of the nineteenth century and quickened after World War II, a journey in which nation-states found their sovereignty undermined by global markets and by the emancipation of corporations from the very countries that had harbored and nurtured them.

Where states once ruled, corporations and cartels not rooted in national identities became more prominent; where power had been rooted in assets and goods—natural resources, manufacturing prowess, and military capability—it grew progressively more transactional, ever more dependent on culture, information, and networking, ever less grounded in national sovereignties. The story of globalization is a story that reinforces the run-amok tendencies of consumerism, since the globalization of market relations exempts them as well from regulation and oversight by democratic institutions. In the global setting, there is neither sovereignty nor legitimacy—nor justice, either.

The story of globalization, already visible in economic relations before World War I, became a political narrative in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the United Nations, international monetary institutions, and the new European order. With the assistance of the hegemon that had helped them move beyond a history of warfare and mass slaughter, Europe’s rival nations sought new forums for transnational cooperation and “pooled sovereignty.”

The narrative was by no means linear. During the Cold War, the economic logic of globalization was overshadowed by the political-military logic of bilateral enmity. In 1989, the fall of Communism and with it the bipolar world yielded not genuine multipolarity but a burst of capitalist triumphalism in which the United States reasserted its global hegemony. The American military and economic power that had shaped the postwar era was now reinforced by cultural power and information networks that did as much to cement a new American empire as to foster globalization. National sovereignty, however, could no longer be understood as the distinguishing feature of that empire.

This was brought home murderously on September 11, 2001, when unelected but self-proclaimed representatives of fundamentalist Islam offered a brutal tutorial to the United States about the meanings of both interdependence and anarchy. The emergence of noxious and anti-democratic forms of anti-imperialism, or whatever term one prefers for the creed that brought terror to New York, should have taught us something. Although America was the only truly global sovereign power left standing, sovereignty itself seemed to have lost much of its historical meaning on that day. To speak of the end of sovereignty would of course be absurd; in a hundred ways, the United States continues to dominate the world just as sovereignty continues to dominate the affairs of nations. But to think that sovereignty’s dynamics have not been fundamentally altered in this interdependent era of global communications, global markets, and global terrorism would be equally foolish.

Regarding the last of these, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas forge alliances with weak states or operate to a degree in their stead, but they are palpably not themselves states and thus not fully vulnerable to the defeat of the states with which they associate. “Taking out” Taliban Afghanistan and Baathist Iraq is of little avail; non-state actors like al-Qaeda constitute a kind of malevolent NGO, with branches across the globe. Overwhelming American firepower is of limited use in this asymmetrical world, where civilians are soldiers and soldiers are permanent migrants of no particular nationality or national loyalty. The balance of terror during the Cold War functioned because the adversaries had addresses, known to one another. Deterrence today is a recipe for irrelevance. Absurdly, a counterstrike against the 9/11 perpetrators could have just as logically been aimed at New Jersey, where several of the conspirators had lived, as at Iraq, where none had ever set foot.



On globalization’s parallel track, demarcated by markets rather than territorial boundaries, corporations and firms have displaced nation-states as the key players on the international scene. They more often use the political institutions created by nation-states to work their will than they are used by those states to enact sovereign political objectives. Even philanthropies such as the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have become weighty actors in the international marketplace, boasting an economic clout that many nation-states cannot begin to exercise.

Consider the ways in which the powerful do business nowadays. When President Hu Jintao of China came to visit President Bush in 2006, his first stop was not in Washington, DC, but in Seattle, Washington, where he met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (the eminence grise of real American power). When President Bush visited China later in the year, the most important message he delivered was not to the government but to Chinese consumers. The message was, “consume more, save less” (so America might reduce its trade deficit).

The lesson implicit in these examples is that private power now trumps public power, because globalization has robbed sovereignty of its force. The United States cannot stop capital and jobs from flowing out and illegal immigrants from flowing in. Its public health campaigns cannot interdict HIV or avian flu or the West Nile virus. Secure borders will not impede terrorism or illegal immigration any more than a radical reduction in American auto emissions (were Americans ever to legislate such a thing) will curb global warming.

In absolute terms, sovereign nations like the United States, China, and Nigeria may not have become less powerful. But the world’s interdependent realities have become far less susceptible to sovereign power. No nation-state has ever enjoyed the unrivaled hegemony that defines the United States today. Yet no superpower has ever been less capable of managing its own destiny. This is the paradox of American power as exerted in places like Iraq, Hong Kong, Colombia, Russia, India, and Sudan: nation to nation, the U.S. should be able to prevail and its interests should dominate. But the issues in question are not national at all, so the powerful sovereign often fails to secure even its minimal interests.

As to enthusiasms for the market’s ability to further the American cause, it is not the beacon of liberty that shines forth from YouTube, and it is not the spirit of patriotism on display at MySpace. Nationalism’s advocates cheer privatization and globalization and seem not to recognize the contradiction. They desire sovereignty without the state, and global markets without a loss of American greatness. They will get neither.

If sovereign power is in decline, and anarchy on the rise, the soft power of the West—its branding and commercial influence—flourishes. Washington is losing the propaganda war to fundamentalist adversaries, but American films and television programs continue to win the media war. The soft brands, however, distance themselves from sovereign America (McDonald's, for example, has embraced the Gallic cartoon figure Asterix and now serves “McLutece” burgers in Paris). Shrek and Spider-Man go where the First Cavalry Division no longer dares. Americans no longer win real wars, but they dominate the video war-game market. It is no longer a Nixon in China who incites transformation in a culture, but Google in China that does so—both bolstering traditional Communist tyranny (Google has removed democratic keywords to please the government) and undermining it (Google pokes holes in China’s closed society).



While granting that sovereignty has passed from the political sector to the economic sector, and at the same time has migrated from the national to the international arena, some suggest that this has merely shifted the venue of sovereignty without altering its character. In fact, it has undermined sovereignty’s core meaning, which is inseparable from the meanings of both politics and the nation-state. The changes have yielded rational control over daily life, traditionally exercised in legitimate political communities, to non-state powers with no legitimacy, or to the chaos of a lawless international system.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, medieval jurisdictions and the residue of an ever less potent Holy Roman Empire could no longer contend with the national aspirations of peoples organizing themselves around language and history rather than around feudal loyalties. They had instead to yield to the new idea of the sovereign nation-state as articulated by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. Today, the sovereign nation-state can no longer preserve its own autonomy or accomodate the new transnational forces that erode its power and test its capacity for justice. The twin forces of global capital and consumerism leave little room for global citizens to emerge. But neither can sovereign states any longer offer the traditional benefits of citizenship, or even contend with the anarchy loosed by interdependence. Inasmuch as working democratic institutions are tethered to sovereignty’s throne, the gradual passing of sovereignty presages the slow death of democracy.

Even within states, where a diluted sovereignty still obtains, consumerism steadily degrades its meaning. The conflation of consumption and citizenship is poisonous to democracy’s survival: When prudent adults become grasping children, the concept of public interest forfeits all meaning. If there is hope, then, it must be in restoring a balance between consumers and citizens, between markets and democracy, and in finding innovative ways to establish that balance globally, where there exists little in the way of democratic oversight or regulation.

For what interdependence really means is that all of the pathologies and problems corroding the modern state have fled the nation and gone global, beyond the reach of sovereign power, while citizens and democracy and institutions of social justice remain trapped inside a sovereign box. The problems are all interdependent, the solutions still tied to independent states; the great questions are global and beyond sovereignty; the remedies are local and bound by sovereignty—a dire asymmetry that puts all at risk.

If globalization and democracy cannot be reconciled, there is likely to be no answer. The center will grow weaker without making the periphery stronger. The entire world will look more and more like Darfur or Basra or Gaza on a bad day—out of control and threatening to all, but without any real benefit to those in whose desperate name the chaos advances. Within nations, the sovereign center to which liberty is tethered will not hold. Among nations, there will be neither center nor sovereignty. Democracy will have no home.

No Silence! On the Wedding of Jamie and Michael (June 22, 2008)

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is an honor to be here today. It is especially significant to Hope and to me, because it is the day after our own wedding anniversary.

Yesterday we were looking at the few pieces of glassware that have survived all the moves and four children. Our marriage has proven more durable than most of it. Looking at pictures of our wedding reminded us that our love has proven more timeless than the dresses of the bridesmaids.

Our marriage, and the love it created, turned out to be stronger than even our affection on that first day of our wedded life. What we made that day weathered sin, disappointment, and the death of a beloved child.

There was more to our marriage than us.

This is the reason for all the elaborate ritual today. It is the heart of why it is appropriate to bring all the party and the pomp to this moment as we can muster.

The reason is simple. We are not here to officiate at making a legal contract. We are not here to celebrate the private affections of two people who love each other. Both those things will happen today, but they are not the important thing. Legal contracts can be legally undone. Private affection can wax and wane, but it is not the basis of what is happening here today.

There is a deeper romance to Christian marriage.

Romance is no longer fashionable, because it is so demanding. Emotions can be satisfied, at least sometimes, but romance cannot. Recently I was reading someone say that the notion that one man and one woman can be satisfied with each until ‘death parts them’ was just silly.

I prefer to think it romantic and divine.

Let me speak plainly to you, Michael and Jamie. As human beings, you have (at least!) two parts. There is the physical and the spiritual component to what makes you human. Whatever philosophers and scientists decide is the relationship between the two, the two exist.

There is a marvelous tension within you, between the desires of the body and the aspirations of the soul. Both are good as created by God and both are deeply harmed by the fall from grace that so plagues humanity. The body is good, but broken. The soul is good, but fallen.

At times your soul will try to ignore the simple wisdom of your body. You must never forget that though you are both more than just physical, you are incarnate!

Your soul will make demands that your body cannot meet.

Hope and I know both of you well enough to know some of the temptations you will face.

Michael: beware the temptation of the workaholic.

Jamie: beware the temptation to forget your own health while helping others.

More common, however, is for the body to make demands on the soul that prevent your higher nature from lifting you from the level of the merely animal to that of the divine image within you. Today you both aspire to something greater than your mere physical desire could ever sustain or produce.

You desire to bring together the Male and the Female and so recreate the whole Image of God in humankind. You long to bring together the fundamentally different expressions of the divine nature in the Man with that expression of God found in the Woman. In becoming one flesh, Holy Scripture says you will have done something great.

Jamie and Michael in desiring each other, you do what any higher creature can do, but in marriage you do what even the angels cannot.

You help produce a divine image of that greater, and even more mysterious, coming together of Christ and His Church.

Your body, fallen as it is, is out of harmony with your soul. It does not, in itself, need this higher thing. It can be more easily satisfied than through the hard work of marriage.

The desire to leave and eternally cleave is the desire of the soul and not of the body. Looked at only from the viewpoint of the physical, the cost is too high and benefits too little. The body looks out from the basement windows and sees the difficulty of reaching the heavens!

From the viewpoint of the romantic, from the higher windows of the soul, such a journey into exclusivity and ever deeper knowing may not by easy, it may even be impossible without divine aide, but it is as necessary to the lover as air is to drowning man. There may none available, but still he longs for it.

Keep longing for it, because the best news on this wedding day is that you are entering a relationship like no other. It can be imitated and aped, but not duplicated. You are coming together in this union of two others and God Himself as blessed your foolishly romantic aspirations.

He sanctified them by His first miracle of at Cana. There the Christ saved the wedding party from ending, in fact made it better after human fears, because marriage is His best image.

There will be times when the wine of your marriage, the physical affection that provides the spice of your love, will run out. Do not be afraid! If you persist, if you get the right help as the wedding party did in Cana, He will see to it that the wine of your love is renewed.

I am here to testify that the new wine is better.

Michael and Jamie:

You told us that you wished to be this holy image to the world. You will fail frequently. You will fail when you are cruel to each other or are selfish. Isn’t it silly to think that you can become less cruel and selfish?

Not silly, but deeply romantic and miraculous in a world where every traditional Christian marriage is a miracle. When you fail, repent and renew your vow.

Even failure at a glorious quest is nobler than those who give up and settle for less. Some settle for the merely sensual satisfaction of mental polygamy. Others grit their teeth and are chaste, but without love. There is no beauty in mere endurance. The death to self, the bloodless martyrdom of dying to self for the sake of the beloved, is extravagant to the point of folly . . . or to the point of being divine!

God Almighty in on your side in this quest. By faith, through grace, you will see glimmers of it in the life to come and the fullness of what you hoped for in each other in the world yet to come.

Our culture does not understand this mystery and even mocks it, but

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet,
until her righteousness goes forth as brightness,
and her salvation as a burning torch.
The nations shall see your righteousness,
and all the kings your glory,
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the LORD will give.

Michael:

You are the groom today. Though it should humble you to your knees, you are a picture of God to us. You are the one who receives the bride and gives her a new name. Of course, this is not because you are, in yourself, superior to Jamie in any fundamental way. You act as her head as a part in a play.

The wedding garments you wear are your very best. You will give your new bride the best wedding feast and honeymoon that you can. Your beneficence (which must continue toward Jamie!) serves as a picture of God’s superabundant jollification in our direction!

You stand today crowned as the spiritual head. The Kingdom of God is not a democracy and you are not elected head. You lead by the grace of God and not by your merit. Like a high school actor called to play Hamlet, the scope and greatness of the role exalts you, but also lays you low.

The very grandeur of today’s unmerited role indicates the very humble tones in which this divine image is painted through you today. You are an image of God painted in earth tones!

In one way, you are an image of the Divine Bridegroom, but playing such a part reminds us even more strongly of human smallness!

You are not just an image of the Lord Jesus, but also of humanity whenever it leads.

Like any man or woman called to lead you do so not by any great merit, for your wisdom to do so is always inadequate, but by the Grace of God. You are called to be prince . . . and I know from many conversations you know that you lack the wisdom.

As Aslan said to Caspian so we, in a less impressive way of course, say that knowing you know you are inadequate is why we trust you to play this part in the drama. We would not trust a spiritual head who thought he was called by merit!

You act today in a divine drama that reminds us of the greater relationship with God that we must all enter in this life.

Jamie:

You stand for all of us today as you take on a new name and become part of a new family. We are the bride of Christ and are given a new name. Your external beauty today is simply a reflection and promise of the inner righteousness that Christ will work in you, and in Michael, and in all of us.

The purity expressed by your gown is a symbol of the holiness of spirit, the purity of love, that God will work in you and in Michael and in the world to come. Your purity was kept for him, just as our worship and the ultimate end of our love must be kept for God.

This very maiden modesty is a picture of humanity before God, but in its seeming smallness and its real humility, it elevates you. The role of the human in this marriage play is painted in gold and silver!

In bowing the knee, you also remind us of God!

Your submission to Michael is an act of supreme charity. As his equal in creation, you bow the knee today and take his name. In this way, as you will if God blesses you to play the role of mother, you remind us of the Incarnation where a greater stopped to serve the lesser.

The image of God is clear in you today.

For both of you, if you are faithful, it can be truly predicted and certainly anticipated that:

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

My guess is that there are some more weary couples who wish that they could start again. There are others, single by providence, that wonder how they can share in this holy mystery.

But that is the point of this ceremony!

Nobody is left out! Nobody needs despair!

We can be born again in our resolve. We can renew our vows, both earthly and heavenly. Those of us who have failed our earthly vows can renew them as we participate in Jamie and Michael making them for the first time.

In God’s providence, through the timeless forgiveness He lives in, it can be as if it were the first time.

But all of us, married or single, can renew the deeper vow to adore the God of Love. We can participate in the divine romance of which this is only an image.

This is not an image of our choosing, which means we cannot change it, but we also cannot truly destroy it! Its meaning is available for all to see!

For the single the news is good. Acting out the roles and forming the image may not be an individual souls calling, but the substance behind the image is freely available to all. We can all be part of the Wedding of the Lamb that Was Slain!

Nobody is forgotten at this wedding feast. Nobody needs to be left out.

You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the LORD delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. […]

So Michael and Jamie, you have done us a great favor today.

We love you and thank you for letting us be here.

You are an image of hope to us. You are an image of the future and it is good. Thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you for your holiness. Thank you for your zeal for romance.

I speak over you these words as if I could see the future:

Go through, go through the gates;
prepare the way for the people;
build up, build up the highway;
clear it of stones;
lift up a signal over the peoples.
Behold, the LORD has proclaimed
to the end of the earth:
Say to the daughter of Zion,
“Behold, your salvation comes;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.”
And they shall be called The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the LORD;
and you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.

Tangled Up in Blue

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

Many of us who are evangelicals have one eye in the rearview mirror as we drive as fast as we can away from our fundamentalist hometown. Remembering the “don’ts” that seemed to summarize legalistic upbringings, we rejoice with Paul’s dictum that “all things are permissible.” We have encountered the freedom of the wide-open space of the gospel. So far, so very good.

My worry is that we have forgotten holiness. We are enjoying the gospel’s freedom so much that we forget its call to holiness. We forget, too, that holiness is for the sake of mission and worship. The Father sets us apart to live as witnesses who invite others to live holy lives of worship.

Paul’s wonderful metaphor of entanglement reminds us that, though the decisive battle has been fought and the foe defeated, we continue to wrestle with spiritual forces, forces that would like nothing more than to insinuate themselves into our lives, to creep and crawl and cover us with worldly concern. They know that they don’t need to create titanic falls; they only need to harry, to worry, to distract, to get us to window-shop, maybe to daydream – that is, to entangle us. They know, too, that tangles are self-perpetuating. In fact, even trying to untangle a tangle can lead us to further tangles! (more)

The Blasphemy Collection

Providing an interesting analysis of the proportion and reaction of blasphemies against Christianity v. other religions....

20. Jesus Christ Superstar
19. Popetown
18. Chocolate Christ
17. Ecce Homo
16. Strelnikoff Mary of Help of Brezje
15. Jerry Springer the Opera
14. The Life of Brian
13. Rude Buddha
12. Gilbert & George Sonofagod exhibition
11. Cartoon of Jack Hobbs
10. The Profit
9. Behzti (Dishonour)
8. Quran on toilet paper
7. Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary
6. Penis on a cross by Danuta Nieznalska
5. Sony’s Cathedral shoot-out game
4. Submission directed by Theo van Gogh
3. Piss Christ
2. Satanic Verses and Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood
1. Jyllands-Posten Mohammed Cartoons
(more)

Personal Freedom Without Political Liberty

By R.R. Reno
First Things

Sometimes events conspire. In mid-May, the California Supreme Court decided that anything less than marriage for same-sex partners leads to a fundamental discrimination against homosexuals. A week or so later, the Texas courts opined that state officials who removed children from a polygamist Mormon sect may have been motivated by an illegitimate religious prejudice.

There is a great deal more political water that needs to go under the bridges in California and Texas. There will be a referendum on gay marriage in California in November. The Texas officials doubtless have other legal tools for harassing the unfortunate folks at Yearning for Zion Ranch. And I’m sure controversy over marriage will join other cultural issues as an important factor in the presidential election this fall.

But we needn’t speculate about electoral politics in order to read the signs of the times. We’re rapidly reaching the point where the spirit of postmodern, nonjudgmental moral minimalism now permits a man to have many wives–or a husband–if that’s what he prefers. Polling shows that among younger Americans the Yuck Factor has succumbed to the Seinfeld Sentiment: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

At first glance, the Seinfeld Sentiment seems generous. Shouldn’t we allow for what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living”? Isn’t an accommodation of differences in belief and behavior the essence of the American experiment: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? If Jim wants to pledge himself to John–or to Jane, Jill, and Jennifer–then why should we stand in the way?

There are many ways to answer these questions, but Douglas Farrow’s provocatively titled book Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage provides an important insight that we do well to ponder. He sets aside the moral arguments against homosexual acts and concentrates on the lasting implications of gay marriage for our political culture.

A Canadian active in the recent failed efforts to block gay marriage there, Farrow looks at the legislation and its enabling amendments that made gay marriage possible in Canada in 2005. He finds an important shift. Where old laws spoke of husbands, wives, and children as “blood relations,” the new laws speak of “persons,” “legal parents,” and “legal parent-child relationships.”

In other words, in the old system, the state presumed the existence of a substantive, natural reality that required legal adumbration: the union of a man and a woman, and the children resulting from their sexual relations. Now the Canadian government sees that it must intervene and redefine marriage and parenthood in order to give fixed legal standing to otherwise fluid and uncertain social relations. When the gay friend donates his sperm to the surrogate mother hired by a lesbian couple, the resulting “family” is a purely legal construct, one that requires the power of state to enforce contracts and attach children to adoptive parents.

The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best.

Plato’s plan of taking children from their parents so that the state can control their socialization has few contemporary proponents. (There are, however, many fellow travelers in the educational establishment and so-called helping professions.) Nonetheless, I think we can see the tyranny of the political in our times. Much like the current abortion regime and the slavery jurisprudence of the antebellum era, proponents of gay marriage imagine that they can redefine inconvenient, permanent realities and remove traditional barriers to the relentless human desire to get what we want. The idea that “bride” and “groom” are not gender specific is a current sign of the absolute triumph of the political will. When we accept that judges and legislators possess the power to define the meaning of marriage, then it’s hard to imagine what would limit the state’s power to redefine social reality other than “personal autonomy,” which turns out to be no limit at all, since everything is desired by somebody somewhere. For all we know, Leona Helmsley wanted to marry her dog.

In short, Farrow is concerned that our present culture of tolerance is quite capable of laying the foundations for the politicization of culture. It seems counterintuitive, but the worry has been central to modern conservatism. Edmund Burke saw that revolution motivated by the unattainable ideal of equality would destroy the deep, pre-political social mores that restrain the will, including the political will; and this restraint is essential for the preservation of liberty. Our contemporary cult of tolerance differs from older fantasies of equality, but the notion that we can accommodate everybody’s desires is just as unrealistic.

Of course, we don’t actually accommodate–and we can’t. As we deconstruct social norms for personal life (and sexual relations are just part of this process), other, more violent and crueler forces take their place. Thus our current situation: a raw system of economic reward and punishment keeps most moving in a socially productive direction, with therapeutic professionals to help manage the occasional dysfunctions. For the rest we have well-armed police forces, prisons, and court-administered “family law.” This shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings cannot live together without a felt force of restraint. What should worry us is the migration of that force outward and into the hands of political actors.

In my experience, most conservatives see the genuine moral importance of tolerance in a free, pluralistic society. But the opposite is not true. Liberals and self-styled progressives are often arrogantly and culpably blind to the importance of settled social mores for a liberal society. They are a counterweight to the political will, which has sought omnipotence in the modern era because it has fancied itself omni-competent.

Maybe we can have gay marriage, even polygamy, and retain a felt sense of social restraint based on some sort of shared sexual mores–an ethic of “sincere commitment” or something of that sort. Yet, as Douglas Farrow points out, from Rousseau to the present, the left has sought to use the power of the state to destroy the influence of traditional norms for marriage and family. In so doing, the left imagines itself expanding the scope of freedom for all. It seems all gain and no loss. In California, homosexuals can get married, and nobody is prohibiting heterosexual marriage. Everybody seems to be getting what he or she wants. But what seems is not necessarily so. When the state can rise up to redefine marriage, then the counterweight of tradition is diminished, the political instruments of power are emboldened, and our collective liberty is at peril.

Christianity Produces a Sound Soul and Sound Body

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Science does a wonderful job making my body healthy.

That is good, but religion does something better. Christianity cures my soul so that I can live well.

After all, bad men are not blessed when they have good health. Sound bodies just give them greater chance to harm others and deeply harm their own souls. As many great saints demonstrate, cure the soul and a man or woman can make a great life out of very trying physical circumstances.

Jesus Christ made my sick soul well.

What is more important than that?

America fixates on physical health, but a man with a fit body and a bad heart is worse than a winning smile that comes with fetid breath. The beauty of the one is spoilt by the grossness of the other.

A sound body with a sick soul does not profit a person. Not surprisingly generally a sound soul will produce a healthier body. The two are closely interrelated.

Christianity is good for you physically. Except for those whose secular fundamentalism limits their perspective, there is sufficient evidence that miracles of physical healing occur as well, something I have personally experienced.

However, spiritual formation is not primarily about physical wellness. Fixing the body is temporary while healing the soul is forever.

You and I are going to sicken and physically die. Given the way things are (due to bad human choices) that is a very good thing and is a major part of God’s severe mercy on humankind. As we are, living forever would grow stale and tedious. As Tennyson puts it:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Death is coming and pretending otherwise is the ignorant cowardice of childish minds.

Part of that preparation is sacrifice for others, doing one’s duty in difficult circumstances, and even being willing to lay down life itself for others. Health bought at the cost of dishonor or betrayal of family, country, or God is worthless. A bad man living is worse off than a good man dead. A coward in the peak of health is disgusting to himself and all decent folk, but a hero’s injuries are an honor to himself, his family, his nation, and his God. Every mother’s labor pains remind us that nothing great can be produced in this life without difficulty and sacrifice.

Avoiding all physical difficulty may be attractive, but it is spiritually destructive. A sedated mind that is pain free may, or may not, be less good than a clear mind suffering pain that teaches depth and charity. Science, limited to is, can never tell us what ought to be done. Our medical doctors need our pastors in order to help with these broader human questions.

Medical science gives religion useful tools, but it is the ethicist and the pastor, experts in human things, that tell us what to do with them. This is as true in medicine as it is in any other area. The medical doctor can tell us how to heal the sick, but only the priest can tell the doctor that he should or should not do so.

Most important of all is religion’s role in making a man fit for the world to come. If this life is a preparation for further life to come, as thinkers from Plato, to Aquinas, to C.S. Lewis believed it to be, then paying attention to the demands of that future life is important.

Good physical fitness produces health in the body, just as ethical fitness produces health in the soul. Too many Americans ignore nutrition and exercise and then damn their luck when they get ill. Quite a few of us may ignore our spiritual health only to find ourselves simply damned.

Sadly, there are know-nothings in our culture who care only for medical technology, but then ignore the wisdom of Christianity in what to do with it. Like television’s Doctor House, they may be brilliant scientists, but bad men. They ignore the words of Jesus and happily save the body and lose their souls. Their error is not in their veneration of medical science, but in the narrowness of their education and concern.

A world without science would be less comfortable. A world without religion would be without meaning. Plato was right when he argued that people with healthy souls live healthier lives both now and in the world to come. The reasonable person cares for both, but prioritizes paradise. Only when he can say “it is well with my soul” can he truly be said to be healthy.

Is Climate Change the World’s Most Important Problem?

By Indur Goklany
Cato@Liberty

A 2005 review article in Nature on the health impacts of climate change provided an estimate of 166,000 deaths as the annual global death toll “attributable” to climate change. This estimate, based on global vital statistics for the year 2000, was derived from a study sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) that even the study’s authors acknowledge may not “accord with the canons of empirical science” (see here). Let’s, nevertheless, accept this flawed estimate as gospel, for the sake of argument.

Where would this rank climate change in the list of global threats to mortality?

In the year 2000, there were a total of 55.8 million deaths worldwide. Thus, climate change may be responsible for less than 0.3% of all deaths globally (based on data for the year 2000). In fact, it would place climate change no higher than 13th among mortality risk factors related to food, nutrition and environment, as shown in the following table taken from pages 355-356 of the book, The Improving State of the World.

[Notably, all extreme weather events (whether due to climate change or the normally abnormal climatic variability) contribute all of 0.03% of global deaths on average. See Table 2, here.]

Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, malaria, urban air pollution.

With respect biodiversity and ecosystems, today the greatest threat is what it always has been — the conversion of land and water habitat to human uses, i.e., agriculture, forestry, and human habitation and infrastructure. See,e.g., here.

Climate change, contrary to claims, is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health, problem facing the world today.

But is it possible that in the foreseeable future, the impact of climate change on public health could outweigh that of other factors?

I’ll get to this question in subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks, but for those who can’t wait, the answer can be found here.

Before Socrates: the Tension Between Personal and Impersonal Causes

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is good to know the origin of ideas so we can critically examine our own assumptions.

The pre-Socratics philosophers who lived in the ancient Greek world helped invent philosophy. Any civilized person owes them a debt of gratitude.

They also were fumbling to discover new ways to think about the world. They did not, however, simply sit under a tree and speculate about the nature of the cosmos. They tried to develop theories to “cover” the observations collected by Greek citizens. Why do seasons change? Why does the coast line crumble here and advance over there? The ideas of men like Anaximander fit at least some of the data available at the time. Given the initial Greek worldview, the theories of Anaximander seemed to fit the facts. After all, as the coastline near a city advances, the water retreats. Further down the beach, the water might be washing away the walls of yet another city. The Law of Opposites “covers” this observed phenomenon. New data would produce new ideas. The Greeks were quite open to changing their views in light of further evidence.

A less productive development in the thinking of these pre-Socratics was the rise of naturalism and a preference for naturalistic explanations. Naturalism, the belief that there is no “supernatural,” must have seemed an improvement on the chaotic religion of the Homeric sagas. Why did a thing happen? More and more the pre-Socratics shifted from personal or theological explanations, to naturalistic ones. A god or hero did not do a thing; some basic force of nature did it. This had a major advantage. If everything that happens in the natural world is given a natural explanation, then the gods and the danger of their unpredictable personalities have been removed.

The difficulty is that this methodology might be very fruitful in one area, but less helpful in another. Humans have personality. It is not obvious that their actions can be reduced to “naturalistic” explanations. Anyone with children knows how impossible it is to predict exactly what ice cream a child will order when confronted with fifty some flavors! Personality plays a role in many normal events in the world. That is not true of every kind of change. The change of seasons seems regular without being personal. Some types of phenomena, behavior in free will beings for example, seem to resist naturalistic “covering” stories. Other types of behavior, leaves falling from trees, seem suited to these solutions.

Greek religion was so irrational that it made early Greek philosophers resist any but naturalistic gods. Gods that were no better than humans could not explain or provide a basis for the cosmic order one could see in looking at the stars. Anaximander, like Thales before him, reduced god to a source of motion.

The lack of personal god or intelligent mind designing the cosmos made it impossible for pre-Socratics like Anaximander to explain regular phenomena in nature that resisted naturalistic explanations. Living things, even with the crude observations then available, seemed too elegantly constructed for crude mechanisms like Anaximander. Anaximander had humans spring out of cruder, fish-like ancestors in a primordial slime. How could such a complex set of changes occur? Did simple opposition explain this magical development? The later Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, would recognize this difficulty and rectify it with better theology and explanations of personal agency.

The problem of the origin of complex, living things was coupled with the problem of “teleology” in nature. Many things look made for a purpose. This purpose is the “telos” of the thing. Eyes are for seeing. They seem made for seeing. They seem perfectly suited for the task of seeing when fully functional. Most living things, and many non-living things, seem to be part of pattern or plan. For good or bad, it is nearly impossible for humans not to say, “The sun is as it is to produce energy so that life can exist.” Fully naturalistic systems cannot speak meaningfully in this way. Things can not have a reason for what they are, beyond the mere accident. “Telos” is gone.

To the Greek, this seemed dangerously close to a return to the chaos and meaninglessness of traditional religion. Each of the pre-Socratics, like Anaximander, brings the “divine” back into the cosmic scene. The god-principle is reduced to some part of nature, but it never disappears. To remove it entirely, would be to lose the possibility of meaning or an explanation of apparent purposefulness in natural things.

This created a fundamental tension in Greek pre-Socratic thought. Gods had to be thrown out of the cosmos at the fundamental level. A physical arche, water for Thales and the indefinite for Anaximander, was substituted. Some “divine” principle was reintroduced, however, to allow for purpose and meaning. Eventually, the Greeks would split into two camps. The atomists would carry reductionism to its logical extreme and banish the divine entirely. The last great pre-Socratic Anaxagoras would postulate a divine Mind apart from the cosmos.

Modern Forgetfulness: Naturalism and Personality Today

The ancient Greeks had a problem that was never fully solved in their time. How could purpose be preserved without introducing the chaos of personality? The need was for a god who was at once eternal, good, rational, and all-powerful. Such a god did not exist in Greek religious thought. Plato postulated a “divine craftsman” and anticipated Intelligent Design arguments in his Laws.

Aristotle further advanced science and metaphysics by allowing his “unmoved mover” a role, however limited, in his cosmology. Greeks still had difficulty motivating “gentlemen” to view matter as worthy of study and keeping personal and impersonal explanations in proper tension.

The coming of Christ was, therefore, good news for science and philosophy.

The Christian church would eventually fill the gap between the two extremes of Greek thought. Christian theology, with a God outside of nature, would allow for both natural and personal cosmic cause. Some things could be recognized as divine action, the creation of life for example. Other things, such as the cycle of seasons, could be given natural explanations in the context of an overarching divine purpose. Only Plato and Aristotle would come close to grasping this elegant solution. As we shall see, neither fully grasped it and only with the coming of Christianity were the necessary philosophical distinctions to be made. Christianity allowed for the final birth of a truly modern science.

Why is the current generation of scientists so hostile to religious thinking? Why do even some Christian scientists allow for only naturalistic explanations and methods in science?

The answer is quite simple. For a long time, the philosophical foundations for science were taken for granted. Eventually they were forgotten or deemed unimportant. Christianity was often recognized as being necessary to birth modern science, but now could be discarded. Purpose and the action of any rational beings other than humans could safely be ignored. Scientists and philosophers now knew enough about the world to assume that such a decision was a safe one.

This mistake was due to the success of chemistry and physics in explaining so many things in a naturalistic manner. Of course, this success was simply a continuation of the prediction that non-living things would be best explained in this manner. It is interesting to note that psychology, sociology, and some areas of biology have not had comparative success.

Some things may be the products of intelligence or intelligences (the mind) are not reducible to purely material or physical explanations.

Eventually, scientists themselves would come to forget their own heritage in this area. A rejection of certain mistaken forms of “teleological” thinking developed in the Middle Ages, then turned into a wholesale denial of purpose, design, and intelligent agency in the cosmos. Scientists and many philosophers refused on principal to allow for a God who did things that were part of the picture. These thinkers saw the growth of naturalistic explanations as without any end. Science would eventually have a naturalistic explanation, with matter and energy in mindless motion, for everything in the cosmos. God was left with nothing to do. The attempt to squeeze him into the shrinking gaps in human scientific knowledge was futile. Better to get it over with and declare God dead. Most of the academic mainstream has gone slowly in this direction.

Certain religious thinkers, attempting to rescue cherished childhood beliefs from the “march of science,” agreed with this naturalistic methodology. It was hoped that accepting naturalism in science would allow for supernatural activity in other areas. Such people forgot that science was claiming every area of the cosmos as its domain. These theistic naturalists relegated God’s actions to areas like salvation history, ethics, and life after death. God was thereby kept far distant from their day to day work in the lab. Jesus could live in their heart and help them be good, but He had nothing to say about biology.

To avoid the charge that this is the “God” of a practical atheism, these persons suggest God is constantly involved in a mysterious “sustaining” of the cosmos. This sustaining work is, of course, invisible to science. It is something for God to do as long as no one can detect it, but it is never clear what that something is. How could God be what makes a thing exist, without this essential function being subject to scientific investigation? No one ever says. The function of such a belief is to obscure, not illuminate. The Christian believer can trumpet his belief in God’s action, without ever worrying about his secular colleagues studying it. Such a tamed god is even less worrisome to secular science than the god of Thales.

The immediate result of this historical forgetfulness has been the wounding of religion. It is possible, as with Thales and Anaximander, to put a sort of impersonal god-force into a fully naturalistic scheme. One could even, if one wished, decide to worship him. It simply is not clear why anyone should. Such a god, invisible on any practical level, is unworthy of daily worship. Most humans are not tempted to worship electricity or a gasoline engine in their car. In the same way, a pre-Socratic god disappears from practical, daily consideration.

Eventually the greatest blow suffered will be in the sciences. This seems like an odd suggestion, given the continuing advances in science today. How is this possible if naturalistic science and philosophy have ruled God out of their practical deliberations? Such a blind retreat from the history of science has been possible in the short term, because most scientists continued to use teleology anyway. The change in thinking has been slow and uneven. In many parts of the world, it has not gone very far even yet. While proclaiming allegiance to natural methodology in principle, many scientists see and write of design and intelligence all the time.

This puts many scientists and philosophers of science in an odd position. They use the language of purpose and design while exiling the author and Designer. DNA experts cannot help but speak of “libraries” of data. Doctors devise cures to help humans function “the way they are supposed to.” Things in nature that look designed, like the workings of the interior of the living cell, are often studied as if they were in fact machines. No one tries to explain their naturalistic origins. Science has often been better than its stated methodology. Naturalists, some of whom mouth a Sunday-go-to-meeting theism, have had it both ways. This has allowed science to keep growing, but is also allowing intellectual dishonesty.

This is changing, however. Post-modern skeptics have revealed the flaws in a purely naturalistic science. If humans are simply part of the vast cosmic scheme, like Thales god, how can they see objectively what that scheme is? If there is no purpose, no being providing order, then why assume there is any order to find. Western science is under assault by these critics. Western science is “white male” science. It is after all just the way that white males have happened to see the world. There is no “truth” out there to find. So perhaps, there could be a woman’s science or a Latino mathematics. The modern scientist has no response. He or she should have given up on the search for meaning and objective truth in their discipline when science banished the supernatural. They could not and do science. Therefore, the modern tried to have both. The post-modern critics attack this sort of “science” for its philosophical inconsistencies.

Another group of scientists and philosophers has recognized that the only hope for science and philosophy is in a return to the Christian view. What are they up to? They are building again on the old Greek tension between the teleological (or personal) explanation and the naturalistic one. Such thinkers will allow both personal and natural explanations for events. Science and philosophy need both types of approach. It is not always clear which approach is best, though progress has surely been made in that area.

The tension is wholesome and any attempt to get rid of it (by making everything theological or naturalistic) is simplistic and counterproductive.

The two approaches are like two different tools in a kit. One uses the appropriate tool at the appropriate time. An archaeologist examines a stone. Is the stone the product of intelligent design or a natural occurrence? She has learned to recognize the purposeful products of human civilization. Her field has studied this question for years. Guidelines have been set. She can, after examining the stone, classify it as “designed” or “natural.” Either philosophical tool can be taken out of her mental kit and used to classify and scientifically examine the rock. If it is an intelligently designed object, she looks for purpose. If it turns out to be just a stone, then she looks for a naturalistic account of its odd shape and structure. She will not be content until she finds it. No one claims when she declares a shaped rock is a tool that she “has given up science.” No fool stands up to claim that seeing design and purpose in the world must lead to the death of science. If that were the case, archeology could not be science.

The pre-Socratic Greeks knew this almost instinctively. Modern researchers know it from practical experience. The data under their microscopes demand it. One cannot simply reduce all of nature to its component parts and demonstrate how it came to be without reference to intelligence. Intelligence itself is resisting simplistic naturalistic explanations. There is a growing need for a philosophy of science that include words off limits to a pure naturalist.

Human Persons and Equal Rights

By JP Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”) with a human nature, and for at least two reasons, naturalists claim that this framework must be abandoned.

For one thing, the progress of science has regularly shifted entities (e.g., heat) from the category of substance (heat was once viewed as the substance caloric that flowed into or out of objects) to the category of quality (heat is an attribute of warmth, not a thing like caloric), or quantity (heat is not the attribute of being warm, it is the mathematical quantity of mean kinetic energy). Since natures are the essences of substances, if there really are no substances (and, instead, there are just collections or aggregates of atoms and molecules), then we should reject the existence of natures. Thus, there most likely is no such thing as a human nature, and talk of such should be understood solely within the categories of biology, chemistry, and physics and with a view of humans as mere ordered aggregates of parts.

Second, Darwin’s theory of evolution has made belief in human nature, though logically possible, nevertheless, quite implausible. As E. Mayr has said:

The concepts of unchanging essences and of complete discontinuities between every eidos (type) and all others make genuine evolutionary thinking impossible. I agree with those who claim that the essentialist philosophies of Aristotle and Plato are incompatible with evolutionary thinking.

This belief has, in turn, lead thinkers like David Hull to make the following observation:

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of “natures” to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about “human nature.” Perhaps all people are persons,” share the same “personhood,” etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate “Homo sapiens” from “human being,” but the result is a much less plausible position.

Finally, this observation has lead a number of thinkers to claim that the traditional sanctity-of-life view of human beings is guilty of speciesism (a racist, unjustified bias towards one’s own biological classification) and to settle on personhood, and not simply on being human, as constituting our locus of value. Thus, value resides in personhood, not humanness. What is a person? A person is anything that satisfies the right list of criteria, e.g., has a self concept, can form meaningful relations with God or others, can use language, can formulate goals and plans, etc.

There are two key implications of this view: 1) There can be human non-persons (e.g., defective newborns, people in comas) and personal non-humans (e.g., orangutans) and the latter have more value than the former. 2) Since the features that constitute personhood can be possessed to a greater or lesser degree, then some individuals can be more of a person and, thus, have more rights and value than other individuals. In my view, 1) is false. Being a person is to being a human as being a color is to being red. There can be non-human persons (angels) but there can be no human non-persons just as there can be colored non-red things (blue things) but no red non-colored things. Proposition 2) is one that naturalists have worked hard, and in my view, unsuccessfully, to avoid. In any case, it should be clear that the high intrinsic and equal value of all human beings is easy to justify given Christian theism, but they are hard to square with naturalism.

One day my daughter, Ashley, came home from sixth grade with a Martin Luther King, Jr. flier that said “All human beings should have equal rights and be treated as having equal value.” I asked her if she believed this statement, and when she answered in the affirmative, I asked her why. Thinking she could get rid of me by giving an answer I wanted, she said it was because of God.

I responded by inviting her to pretend that there was no God. I pointed to a beautiful painting on the wall over our sofa and to a piece of trash on the coffee table I forgot to throw away the night before. I then asked that if the house were burning down and she could save only one of these objects, would she be obligated to save one, or would the two objects be on a par so she could decide which to save by flipping a coin. She responded that the painting should be saved because it was of more value than the trash. I asked the same question about the piece of trash and our dog, KC. Irritated, she affirmed that the dog should be saved, not the trash, because KC is precious.

I then pointed out that we had learned a lesson: Equals ought to be treated equally, and unequals ought to be treated unequally. It would be wrong to flip a coin to decide between the trash and our dog, because that would be to treat two unequal things as though they were of equal value. I then noted that human beings have nothing in common that is equal: some are beautiful, some ugly, some smart, some not, some athletic, some not, some socially useful, some not, and so on. Ashley responded by pointing out that there was, in fact, something we all have in common: belly buttons.

I then noted that some have large and some have small belly buttons. “Should the people with large ones be given greater rights?” I asked. Moreover, if it were in virtue of having a belly button that we had value, if we removed someone’s belly button, could we now use that person as a door stop (since he/she had lost his/her source of value)?

I concluded that if equal rights and value were to be justified, two things were required: (1) We had to have something in common that was equal. (2) Whatever that “something” was, it had to be deep, weighty and important, not silly and trivial like a belly button. If we are made in the image of God as Dr. King argued, then equal rights/value is easy to justify. If not, it may well be impossible to justify. That’s something to ponder, isn’t it?

On Human Things in Education

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is easy to forget that science is not the only way, or even the most important way, to learn. Shakespeare can teach us as much as any physics text and on subjects of greater importance.

Knowing what a thing is made of, after all, does not tell us what it is.

Scientists, even those who are Christian can fall into the dangerous trap of worshiping science. If such men can account for the visible world, then they rest content. Monstrous evils done in scientific experimentation, such as human cloning, are justified simply because they are scientific.

Literature, the fine arts, theater, and music teach humans what it is to be good, true, and beautiful. They point to meaning. What does it profit a man to learn all mysteries of matter and energy if he does not have love? Science can only simulate or stimulate the feelings of love, but they cannot create one real passion.

Without the humanities, a queen is just a woman, a husband is just a man, and romance just procreation. Meaning is created by persons, gods and men, and cannot arise like a swamp gas from mindless matter.

Philosophy has always been tempted by two extremes: idealism and materialism. Some thinkers wish to make everything an ideal. Matter is but a dream.

So fundamental is the sense of personhood and meaning, that it is easier to believe that matter and energy are the product of mind than that mind is the product of matter.

Study of the classics, required of all the first scientists in places like Victorian England, is a waste of time. They assume the philosophy of the Bible is somehow self-authenticating. Some even go as far as to believe that only scientific authentication is important. Fortunately, parallel to the Intelligent Design movement has been resurgence in the practice of classical philosophy and apologetics led by scholars such as J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Craig Hazen.

Because the crisis with science has been so pronounced, few apologists and philosophers have failed to account for the relationship of Christianity with the visible world. Sadly, the education of those working in science has not kept pace in the area of humanities. The philosophers of early Greece and Rome used to be the common intellectual property of all college graduates. This is no longer the case, but scientists do not know what they are missing. Shakespeare may be unknown to a scientist, but he feels no sense of shame. However, he would rightly feel distressed by a “well educated” person who had no idea of the history or methods of science.

Nor is it simply that the classical philosophical and literary education will make one a “better person” in some way distinct from the work of science. Better philosophers are better scientists. How many brilliant scientific ideas have been cut short by the ugly and unreflective scientism picked up in graduate school by scientists? One shudders to think. Of course, it is also not a small thing that philosophy and the humanities can make a better citizen. In a republic like the United States, it is not a good thing when influential voters are almost entirely ignorant of soul work.

Christianity is congenial to both the sciences and the humanities without making a god of one or the other. Christianity unites the two parts of the University. It cares about and makes claims about the visible world. Christians are not religious neo-Platonists. This is a philosophy the best of the Fathers rejected, after serious consideration, as sub-Christian. On the other hand, Christians are not mystical Epicureans. The Fathers believe in an invisible world even more important than the visible. Traditional Christianity must unite the sciences and the humanities.

Can science sustain itself without traditional Christianity? In individual cases, it certainly can, but culturally it is unlikely. If a new dark age comes, it will be because barbarians no longer can practice the virtues or understand the humanities that make scientific men and the culture that sustains them possible.

Christopher Hitchens, or any of the new atheists who attack Christianity with more heat than light, is not the main opponent of Christian civilization. Instead, it is the loss of the imagination and hope for something better that infected the church long before Hitchens was born. If we were doing our job, then Hitchens would have no force.

The combination of science and the humanities in the ancient Christian university came from the love of God. If a man loved God, then he had to love the men and the cosmos God made.

Poets like Dante presented the best science of their day in the greatest poetry written up to that point. The failure of Christendom was to maintain that balance. The result was horrific.