“Consider this: 61% of self-identified evangelicals who attended a caucus Tuesday night in Iowa voted for a candidate who is either Roman Catholic (Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum) or Mormon (Mitt Romney, who won the caucuses, besting Santorum by eight votes ).

“Here’s how the evangelical vote broke down: 32% for Santorum, 18% for Ron Paul, 13% each for Romney, Gingrich and Rick Perry, 6% for Michele Bachmann and 1% for Jon Huntsman.

“This suggests a more nuanced and complex portrait of voters of faith. They are often crudely portrayed as voting based solely on identity politics, born suckers for quotes from Scripture or “code words” laced in the speeches of candidates appealing to their spiritual beliefs.

“Evangelical voters, it turns out, are a more sophisticated bunch, judging candidates on a broad continuum of considerations from their personal faith and character to leadership attributes and electability.”

As usual, Reed has a point. But of course, there are a core of issues that do appeal to Christian evangelical voters. Also, I wouldn’t simply dismiss the idea that 32% of the evangelicals, a plurality, favored Santorum. He may be Catholic, but he does speak in terms readily understood by the right wing of American evangelicals; and some Catholics openly question how Catholic Santorum really is.

Perhaps these complex caucus results show only that Evangelicals make their decisions based on hope. Hope that they can find a candidate who will address the greatest number of their concerns in the most sympathetic manner. And furthermore that, because the candidates do mainly stick to “code words” (and other forms of propaganda) voters are always forced to hold their noses and take their best guess.

Source: CNN Religion Blogs

I do believe that scholars working in the Humanities (Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, History, Cultural and Media Studies, Art and Literary Criticism, and cognate fields) face a dangerous threat of exhaustion unto death. Attribute the situation to any number of factors.

During the past century and a half the earth’s population has exploded, leading to a proliferation of new philosophies, theologies, religions, historical investigations, and artistic and literary productions. The sheer volume of potential objects for critical activity would overwhelm the capacities of any particular scholar.

Of course, disciplinary mastery has always been elusive, but today, it is frankly impossible. Given that the number of potential contemporary objects of study far exceeds the (already numerous) important objects that have survived from previous centuries and from antiquity, the balance of work to be done must focus on “contemporary” materials. And so, in this context the idea of a classical canon of important works is increasingly hard to defend to an academic audience — forget about successfully selling the canon to the next generation of readers, distracted as they are by hundreds of cable channels, tens of thousands of games, millions of websites, and the myriad options for textualized and mediated connectivity in the world of social media.

Coincident with this proliferation of potential objects of criticism, and the “contemporization” of discourse, there has been an inevitable fragmentation of academics into ever more numerous and narrow specializations. Increasingly, intellectuals find themselves separated into camps, pockets, and subcultures, talking either at cross purposes, or on parallel, non-convergent lines. Within the subdisciplines, the proliferation of work forces academics to turn from the objects that should properly occupy their energies and towards bibliographic and pedantic analysis of scholarship. Scholarship becomes scholarship on scholarship, and it seems ever less likely that we can expect synthetic work to emerge or find a broad, popular audience. Nobody is listening.

At the same time, economic practices have shifted dramatically, so that scholars are no longer in the economically privileged position of their great grandfathers. Scholarship is not a field dominated by men with wives and nannies for the children, maids for the home, cooks for their food and secretaries for their paperwork. Most scholars today lack such economic supports for their life of the mind. Instead, we labor along other servants in the service economy, being extremely lucky to have our summer vacations as the main thing that sets us apart from other typical dual-income middle middle class suburban/urban households, where children, housework, and the worries of everyday life constantly undermine “serious work.”

And beyond this, while a few exalted academics at elite schools still enjoy the leisure and economic support they need to do “research” (All Souls College at Oxford University springs to mind… it still exists), most scholars are teaching more credit hours, to more students, for less pay, with fewer teaching assistants, all the while dealing with a even greater emphasis on the culture of bureaucratic oversight for their work. Try saying the phrase “outcomes assessment” to any college professor you know and watch his or her brain start to melt inside the skull. It’s amusing.

Such mundanities are certainly not the only set of distractions for middle aged scholars like myself. We operate in the same informational matrix as our students; social media bombards us with the constant recommendations of (or banal updates from) friends, our work email inboxes overflow with “carbon copied” announcements of events and other chatter. My generation was the first to work through school with the burden of knowing about the psychological problem called “ADHD”; but this disorder seems to have been robustly adopted as a typical cognitive paradigm.

These words of mine today were inspired by a recent essay in Philosophy Now, on the “Death of Postmodernism.” I think if the essay is read correctly, it matters very little whether its author, Alan Kirby, may be correct that “Postmodernism” is a useful scholarly rubric or even a live movement in art and culture. (The “postmodern” already seemed like a dead issue when I first heard the term and tried to read the impenetrable postmodernists back in sophomore year of college, in 1989; my friends and I instead suggested that we should just be “postfuturists” and get over ourselves already). What seems important, instead, is to notice how exhausted Kirby sounds, as if he simply cannot fathom how we will ever, as scholars, come to terms with the technological transformations of text and reading practices that he so deftly identifies. He calls the new way of creating and reading texts “pseudo-modern,” which stretches the idea of “modernity” well past the breaking point, as far as I am concerned. Like me, he sees a bewildering variety in the modern show, text, and game, and also like me, he despairs at the undeniably vapid and shallow nature of it all. The fact that Kirby’s analysis turns on an apparent generation gap (speak for yourself, sir!) between today’s teachers and the supposedly different readers and consumers that make up today’s students highlights the same issue that I raise above: faced with ever expanding ranks of junior human beings, with their strange ways of talking and their unfathomable tastes in music and art, many of us in older generations are apt to freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

I’d keep working on this little rant and give my suggestions about how I think we ought to deal with this desperate situation of our exhaustion, but I have to stop writing and take care of my 21 month old son, James.

But such a position amounts to support of no funding at all for government. It would be crazy for American politicians, who are paid handsome salaries and given handsome benefits at taxpayer expense, to oppose all funding for government. Right?

Rutgers philosopher Ernie Lepore writes about poetry in yesterday’s installment of “The Stone,” a philosophy “blog” on the New York Times. Something about the article rankled me and inspired this cranky response.

Lapore says the New Critics locate meaning, and the resistance of poetry to both translation and explanation, in a magical (or mystical) property of the words themselves, but his critique describes a pomegranate, examines an orange, condemns an apple, then recommends something that looks to me just like a pomegranate. Apples to oranges, Lapore.

He confounds words like “meaning” “interpretation” “translation” and “paraphrase” as if their mutual substitution could be accomplished without qualification. In general, he seems to think definitional meaning resides at the level of the word, or nearly so, and does not discuss combinatorial syntax, figure, image, denotation, connotation, nor manifest versus latent content. No mention of cultural identity, class, historical and geographical factors, codes or other vexed subtleties of discourse. Apparently he wrongly assumes these do not matter to his argument. Perhaps he thinks they can be easily disposed of in phrases like … “Linguistic expressions mean whatever they mean wherever they occur” — but that is just silly.

His article takes on the problem of explaining the truth behind the persistent ‘heresy of paraphrase’ … beginning with a witticism from Eliot … literalism, I’d call Eliot’s quip … as if New Critics all just thought that poetry means only what is said. He conflates the idea with translators’ complaints that languages resist full translation. (If languages did not resist translation, we’d all be effortlessly multilingual). And mixes in the notion, one I find typical of undergraduate writers, and unworthy of a philosopher, that interpretation can be accomplished by plot summary.

He ends up defending a simple distinction between articulation (“perceptible” or measurable qualities of the presentation of words) and lexical meanings. Poetry brings intentional articulation in to play, and that’s why it can’t simply be paraphrased.

He writes: “Of course, we can introduce a new expression to mean exactly whatever an old expression means but since poems can be about their own articulations, substituting synonyms will not result in an exact paraphrase or translation. To do so requires not only synonymies but also identical articulations, and only repetition ensures this end.”

Notice here that what he calls articulation is reserved by definition from “meaning” … but this simply cannot be the case.

He says “the poet wants to draw the audience’s attention to … articulations as much as to the ideas the words so articulated express” but also says poetry differs from prose only in that it can be more “about” its articulation.

Once you’ve admitted that the poet can take language and make it about its articulation, you’ve committed yourself to a robust and complex idea of meaning. It doesn’t matter if you jest, like Elliot, or dismiss complexities with a vapid gloss like “linguistic expressions mean whatever they mean wherever they occur, but in poetry (as in other forms of mentioning) the medium really becomes the message.”

No poem can “be about” something other than its meaning; meaning is the aboutness of discourse.

A paragraph or so earlier Lapore had blasted New Critics for claiming that “form shapes content” [his italics, ironically] a notion he mocks as both “quasi-mystical” and “magical” … utter nonsense. Only the color blind, the tone deaf, and the naive would insist upon the idea.

A poem’s unique articulations have been brought into its meaning; manifest features manifestly shape the content of discourse. Meaning cannot be found in a dictionary or thesaurus, and you cannot even look up the meaning of poems in books.

I think Lapore is right on the money to emphasize the importance of articulation as a key way of distinguishing poetry from prose; of course an older age was content to call this music, and under his analysis, we can still call it music.

Lapore implies that an interpretation and a summary of a poem amount to the same thing, and then ends up defending a ridiculous version of ‘the heresy of paraphrase’ on the allegedly new grounds that summaries leave out the music. He doesn’t actually care to interpret poetry, so he seems not to care without caring that his conflation of paraphrase and meaning would make interpretation, by his own account, more or less impossible for more “poetic” texts. Again, nonsense. (Also nonsense: that ‘interpretation’ is restricted to discovering “meaning” on his or my terms).

Meaning must be sought afresh in every utterance, as a dog finds water in a bowl, as a parent places a hand on a child’s forehead, as a student looks at the clock. Meaning is not strictly lexical or referential; it is critical. A worker opens the days newspaper, or a believer approaches scripture. All meaning is phenomenon; it resides in the lived, temporal, historical present — the appearance or presentation — of communicative action. This necessarily includes linguistic and paralinguistic features.

To talk about meaning in things, among other things and their meanings, that’s interpretation.

Beware of pomegranate seeds.

One single reliable authority can surpass a mass of experts? If only! If only such authority existed.

For the purposes of this little rant there is no reason to try to justify the unjustifiable. So let me state at the outset that I will go ahead and join prophecy to wisdom. My vision is for Biblical Studies.

When the history of the present era of Scholarship on Biblical Literature is written, one hundred, or two hundred years from now, it will likely be seen as an era of exhaustion. This is the era of criticism’s exhaustion. And of the exhausted critic.

Dominated by the exhaustive literature review, the exhaustive review of evidence, the exhaustive survey of theories, perspectives and interpretations, scholarship today puts the greatest and most elite scholars to work with great energy cataloging, compiling and critiquing … their own contribution to the subject of study. The bibliography and annotations are an art form unto themselves. Year by year, there is an endless parade of published work on subjects that interest Biblical Scholars… while the subjects themselves vanish in a fog of vague words about the published scholarship. No one has time to read any body else deeply, because there are too many conversation partners. And the primary sources are not read deeply, closely, or creatively enough.

We are examiners of interpretations. We splice and winnow and classify, anxious to include all, to miss nothing, to note precedent. We cannot proceed with any interpretation apart from the examination of other interpreters. We map carefully the entire landscape of critical discussion, and only then stake our own place in the field, often defining it by the slimmest and most subtle differences of discourse.

Acrobats of research, we ascend mountains of books, great edifices of commentary, surmounting the work of others by means of the slenderest toe holds and hand holds of criticism, on virtual cracks, muscling our way past overhanging cliffs of redundant reviews of reviews of reviews of evidence, determined to contribute but with no real sense of what needs doing. We climb it because it is there.

If this were all, it would be enough, but it is far from all. Having exhausted traditional areas of interpretation, Biblical Studies defines new fields, which are much more difficult to exhaust, such as the theoretically limitless project of Wirkungsgeschichte. Everything and anything can be subjected to Wirkungsgeschichte. It is endless. After the canonical, there is the pericanonical, heterocanonical, apocryphal, novelistic, polemic, heresiological, apologetic, historical…. there is art and architecture, music and graffiti, artifacts and locations, flim, television, the internet, text messages… there is no boundary. The scholar cannot relax, because ars longa vita breva.

Book after book is published. Yet, all literary art is dead. The scholar apologizes, as if for a fart, after a moment of levity is emitted into print. A well turned phrase is buried beneath a jumbled pile of shallow annotations. There are only a couple of poets, and they are writing about narrow, technical things.

Consider, as well, that greatest of achievements itself. The Bibliography. The longest, greatest bibliography — howsoever long or great — if it be on a specialized area of research, it resembles nothing so much as a chronicle of oblivion.

Why are we not more wary of publishing?

For each of us, in the end, after all, there is no ars, there is only breva vita. In this life there is limited energy available for scientific investigation — and family, friends, food, actual art, and everything else too. At journey’s end you must leave your learning behind you. It is useful to remember this, young scholar. There is no time for idle questions. Make sure your questions are interesting enough that the answers will matter after you are dead and gone. And all the usual advice about style applies too.

Both Nussbaum and Dewey argue for a progressive and humanistic vision of democracy as an ideal to be striven for, and both view education as an essential, or perhaps as the essential, tool or process which can help democracy achieve its aims.

Dewey’s high minded essay could perhaps be faulted for its tendency to assert and stipulate rather than to prove its claims; it is a piece of youthful sermonizing (he was 29 at the time of publication). But its brilliance is clear enough. The essay argues against a “numerical” understanding of “democracy” as if it were simply a matter of giving rule and power to the mass of individualistic individuals. For Dewey, democracy is an ethical ideal. The form of governance that emerges from democracy (for Dewey, “democracy” is not merely a form of government, just as the “state” or “nation” is not identical with “government”) is rooted in an inescapable assumption that such governance rests upon the dignity and worth of the individual personality: “In a word, democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.” Sovereignty originates with the people, revealing that democracy has an ethical core; the idea of the infinitely dignified individual (or in Dewey’s terms, personality) implies the “highest ethical ideal which humanity has yet reached,” an ideal which Dewey freely asserts can be embodied in that classic motto of the French revolution: “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Dewey’s idea of the sovereign personality implies an “individualism of freedom, of responsibility, of initiative to and for the ethical ideal.” Ultimately, this ethical ideal demands progress towards full liberty for individuals, but also full equality and brotherhood: not just under the law, but also in what he terms the “industrial” (we would say, “economic”) sphere of life: “democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial, as well as civil and political… a democracy of wealth is a necessity.” Having claimed this, he denies, quite flatly, that this implies an allegiance to any kind of socialism or redistribution of wealth. Such a redistributionist idea of economic or industrial equality would threaten to reduce the democratic ideal to a concept of merely numerical mob rule. Equality isn’t quantitative, it’s qualitative. “[D]emocracy is anything but a numerical notion; and… the numerical application of it is as much out of place here as it is everywhere else.”

At this point, Dewey appeals to a progressive ideal informed by a neo-Hegelian concept of evolution:

“What is meant by a democracy of wealth we shall not know until it is more of a reality than it is now. In general, however, it means and must mean that all industrial relations are to be regarded as subordinate to human relations, to the law of personality. Numerical identity is not required; it is not even allowed: but it is absolutely required that industrial organization shall be made a social function.

Clearly enough, such a transformation of society’s economic relations is only possible when we transform people’s understandings of who they are, and of who their fellow citizens are. Human beings are ends, not means to ends. As ends unto themselves, individual personalities are not at the disposal of anyone. They do not exist for the service of a larger economic collective or as mere units in a system of production. Dewey knew that the future transformation of civil, political, and industrial relations, depending as it does on a proper self-understanding, could only happen through a transformation of the educational system; so he spent the majority of his subsequent career working to effect just such a transformation. This was his motive in the establishment of the University of Chicago Lab School, his involvement in Jane Addams’ Hull House, in his participation in the creation of the New School of Social Research in New York, and also in his publication of a long series of treatises on pedagogical theory. His theoretical work became dramatically influential.

Yet, almost a century and a quarter later, Nussbaum now points to an alarming decline in Dewey’s influence. Or perhaps it might be better to say, she points to a reactionary movement against such progressive values in education. Governments and populations everywhere have begun to insist that the first and greatest function of education is to serve what Dewey would call an industrial goal: economic development and growth in GNP. Contemporary public policy focuses on how education can create quantifiable and measurable progress. This manifests, on the one hand, most notably as a tendency to neglect or even de-fund “the humanities” in favor of “vocational” or “scientific” education. For the results of education in the humanities cannot so easily be numerically assessed. On the other hand, it results in the phenomenon of “teaching to the test”: placing an undue emphasis on quantifiable results in the assessment of student outcomes. Such an emphasis threatens to abandon critical thinking as an educational goal, in favor of rote memorization of vocabulary, math, and factual data, but it also produces such monstrous abortions of pedagogical practice as computer assisted grading of written essays on the SATs. Even at the progressive, private Lab School, founded by John Dewey, Nussbaum warns, the “wealthy parents who send their kids to this elite school [are] … impatient with allegedly superfluous skills, and intent on getting their children filled with testable skills that seem likely to produce financial success … [and] are trying to change the school’s guiding vision.”

But Education for democracy cannot be, to borrow Dewey’s term, “numerical.” It should not be “for profit.” It should be guided instead by the ethical ideal without which true democracy simply does not exist. Democracy, the ground of real political sovereignty, is also the ground of industrial life, properly understood. We don’t, to paraphrase Dewey’s words, apply ethics to the “industrial sphere.” Instead, “the economic and industrial life is in itself ethical, … it is to be made contributory to the realization of personality through the formation of a higher and more complete unity among men.”

In comparing this sublime essay of Dewey’s with that of the celebrated Nussbaum, I have found myself a little bit disappointed. Dewey writes like a critical academic prophet, full of philosophical abstractions and idealistic concerns. Nussbaum writes plainly, directly, and clearly. I worry that she sees herself as writing for an academic and popular audience that has not only lost its faith in humanistic ideals of education, but has grown weary of parsing philosophically difficult works. Does she keep her language simple because she perceives that, in the age of cable television, the internet, video games, and the decline of the newspaper, our facility with language has atrophied? Or is she simply a master educator who, having reached a mature 64 years of age, feels no need to impress us with her erudition?

Never mind. She is also brilliant, and that comes through. What sets Nussbaum’s ethics apart from Dewey’s is an explicit commitment to expanding our understanding of the basis of what Dewey merely called “fraternity” without blushing at the ideological freight of such gendered language. Nussbaum makes an interesting argument that begins with a psychoanalytic and social-psychological understanding of child development. Among the goals of education must be an effort to overcome the natural narcissism and aggression of the individual (and of those limited groups of individuals known as cliques, parties, tribes, classes, etc.) by providing an opportunity for children to develop their equally natural capacities for compassion, empathy, and understanding of others, and by cultivating a critical awareness of the myths and ideologies that impinge upon a true self-understanding and facilitate oppression and exploitation of “others.” The humanities in particular are those disciplines which present and explore the human condition in such a way as to help cultivate an awareness of “other people … not [as] … slaves but [as] separate beings with the right to lives of their own” (Nussbaum, 37).

About 2500 years ago, in China, it is reported that the Confucian philosopher Mencius “went to see King Hui of Liang.”

The king said, ‘Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, a distance of a thousand li, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?’

Mencius replied, ‘Why must your majesty use that word “profit”? What I am provided with, are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics. …

‘If your Majesty say, “What is to be done to profit my kingdom?” the great officers will say, “What is to be done to profit our families?” and the inferior officers and the common people will say, “What is to be done to profit our persons?” Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit the one from the other, and the kingdom will be endangered… if righteousness be put last, and profit be put first, they will not be satisfied without snatching all.

‘Let your Majesty also say, “Benevolence and righteousness, and let these be your only themes.” Why must you use the word — “profit?”

The quotation is taken from The Mencius, a classic of the Chinese educational system, as it appears in a reader that we use in our freshman humanities course at Mars Hill College, LAA 121: Character, which explores concepts of human nature and behavior. If anything, it shows that Nussbaum is in good company. The ancient sages would agree: where profit becomes the supreme motive, we have lost our way, and our society is endangered. We can criticize their pedagogical theories, their concept of hierarchy, order and government, their lack of understanding of the true basis of sovereignty in the dignity of the people, but the Confucians clearly upheld transcendent values that we ourselves have begun to lose sight of. To our peril.

Human beings are not servants of profit. They are not means to an end. Yet the structures of our system, industrial and educational, seem poised to embrace this profoundly anti-humanistic idea, in the name of “development,” or “financial success.” They will not do so consciously; they will do so with the best intentions, but without realizing the implications of their shift of ideals. Insofar as we Americans have allowed the economic bottom line, the concept of profit, to become central to our understanding of educational success, we have not only rejected the true and proper aims of education in a democratic society, we have actually embraced a profoundly anti-democratic conception of our society. Something dire necessarily follows from such an audacious ideological shift. Dare I point it out? Can you afford to ignore my oracle? Our republic cannot survive the abandonment of its democratic ideal. And will not.

National Public Radio’s own Terry Gross, host of the popular interview program Fresh Air, interviewed Foner last fall when his book was first published. Yesterday (Feb. 21st, 2011), that interview was rebroadcast in celebration of the book receiving the prize. The interview, which can of course be easily streamed online at the Fresh Air website, is more than worth your time.

Check it out: Terry Gross, interview with historian Eric Foner, “Tracing President Lincoln’s Thoughts on Slavery” (NPR Radio Broadcast, Feb. 21st, 2011).

Now, on Wednesday of this week, my American Philosophy class will be discussing primary sources that exemplify the two most significant political debates of mid-19th century America: suffrage for women and the abolition of slavery. So the timing of this interview could not be more perfect. So much so, in fact, that it tempts me to sense providence at work for us (yet again).

For those who are curious, our class will be reading excerpts from the writings of abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) and from the memoir and speeches of the intellectually powerful fugitive slave Frederick Douglass (1818–1895):

{a} Sarah M. Grimké, Letters IV–VIII, pages 22–55, in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman Addressed to Mary S. Parker President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (1838) [google].

{b} Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Chapter 23, "Introduced to the Abolitionists" (pp. 357-363) [google] and also, "Reception Speech of May 12, 1846" (pp. 407–418) [google].

Lots to talk about here. The Foner interview provides a glimpse into the fascinatingly complex background to the national debate.

Philosophical theology, or theological philosophizing, proceeds in the same manner as all philosophy: it attempts to follow a logical path of argument using rationalization and reflection on experience. What differentiates it from “pure” philosophy is its relationship to structures of authority. Christian theological philosophy often uses Biblical scripture as its chief touchstone of authority, even as it also appeals to traditional formulations of doctrine and practice (the examples we have considered appeal to orthodox Calvinist Protestantism; Arminian and even Deist examples could also be adduced). Finally, such philosophizing has as its motive not so much a natural curiosity about “enduring questions” but a practical interest in improving the lives of living communities; this motive explains the popularity of the genre “sermon” in such literature (and this also applies to those close relatives of the sermon, the “speech,” “lecture,” “tract,” and “pamphlet”).

The prominence of Christian religious ideology in early American thought is remarkable; it colors even political theory. This is easily enough explained by the facts of history peculiar to the American experience. The most prominent colonies were established as havens for dissenting Christian sectarians. These sectarians sought to establish ideal communities on the basis of what they understood to be pure doctrine, where dissenters would have the freedom to be (their own brand of) dissenters. Where Puritans (or Pilgrims, or Quakers, etc.) would have religious liberty, which for most of the theorists was termed “liberty of conscience,” i.e. the freedom to believe that which one’s own conscience judged to be true without persecution by an outside authority.

However, from the earliest period, and especially among the Puritans, the political structures that were established to safeguard Puritan society in its “liberties” came into conflict with the consciences of the individuals who made up those communities. American thought, from the time of the antinomian crisis, has been repeatedly drawn to the perennial tensions between the ideal of liberty and the realities of community life.

By the mid 18th century, we note the absolute demise of the Puritan ideal of society as a community of saints who would conform to a consensus of shared conscience. The economic and martial interdependence of the politically independent colonies, each with its own ecclesiastical structures, governments, colleges, etc., meant that no single political, religious, or intellectual authority could prevail in any dispute that arose over matters of conscience. There was also a proliferation of competing protestant religious doctrines; the confusion of this situation was aggravated rather than ameliorated by the Great Awakening. And doubtless, underneath the surface lurked other, future disputes that would awaken in the turbulent period between the late 19th to 20th centuries (over slavery, gender, immigration, alcohol, race, etc.). Already by the revolutionary era, disagreement is visible over practices such as slavery and over the rights of women; such disagreement deepened divisions and differences among the populace. For evidence of the 18th century American debate on slavery, consider, for example, Tom Paine’s 1775 editorial on the practice; not to mention the late 17th century writings of John Locke on slavery, from the same writings On Civil Government that so deeply influenced the Founding Fathers. For evidence of debate on the rights of women, see the letters of Abigail Adams to her husband, John, the second president of the United States (especially #102).

In the perennial tension between conformity and liberty, American political theorists chose liberty. Whatever economic and social reasons may be cited by modern historians, the ideological foundation of the American Revolution can still be said to have been a call to liberty. So Thomas Paine (in Common Sense) calls Americans to fight for their natural right of liberty and to express a new compact in a republican form of government. Were society small enough, Paine argues, it would have no need of government, since conformity and mutual striving towards shared goals would be the natural course of things. But we have no one society, but many societies, and so, collective representation is the only way to ensure that government works with the consent of the governed. So Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States (in the Declaration of Independence) appeals to a concept of the natural right of humans to liberty. Both men assert the natural rights of humans to resist all political tyranny.

After the conclusion of the war, as the Founders were trying to persuade the states to adopt the proposed constitution of the Republic of the United States, the Federalist and future fourth president, James Madison, discussed the advantages of the proposed union (in The Federalist #10) in a way that plainly appeals to a concept of of human nature which emphasizes our natural tendency to pursue our own interests, or our own happiness. Differences in interest are traced to our inherent individuality; we each consider the world from our own vantage points, and each of us has a separate consciousness (or understanding) of that world and conscience judging our actions in that world. This tendency leads to the formation of factions of competing shared interests (and one is here reminded of how the first charge leveled against Anne Hutchinson was that she had joined a “faction” against the Company). Madison argues that, when a country is large enough, and if legislative authority is vested in representatives who must each answer to regionally and socially separate constituencies, the power of factions to infringe on the rights of their fellow citizens is restricted.

If revolution was fought to secure liberty for the American people against the interests of the British, the republican constitution was meant to secure liberty for the people from themselves.

Thus, American society chose liberty, not community or conformity.

This liberty was fully secured in law by the Bill of Rights, which placed, in its first article, “the establishment clause” which prohibited the legislature of representatives from interfering with religion in any way. Jefferson argued that this article built a “wall of separation” between Church and State (see his Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association for the phrase). And while several states hung on to a State-level establishment of religion for a few decades (notably, Connecticut and Massachusetts), the same spirit of fighting for liberty that prevailed in the revolutionary war was now directed against these pockets of society where some kind of religious conformity was still held up as the ideal. Echoing both Paine’s Common Sense, Williams’ Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, and the ideas expressed in Jefferson’s 1785 Bill for Establishing Religious Liberty in Virginia, the Baptist agitator John Leland’s 1791 sermon The Rights of Conscience Inalienable appeals to the people of Connecticut to recognize the inherent natural right of the conscience to be free (as indeed it cannot be compelled by force, it is free); and so, he says, they must embrace religious liberty as the only sure way to defend themselves against “Yahoo” Churchmen in legal robes.

The consequences of this decision in favor of religious liberty in America are far reaching. Shortly after the start of the 19th century, a new revival, called the Second Great Awakening, was kicked off, and the membership of churches in all the newly established “Mainline” denominations started growing rapidly. It was the start of the century of “evangelical consensus” in America. But in a climate of legally established religious liberty, there was also room (if not hospitality) for the emergence of a remarkable diversity of opinion in religious matters. The center of Christian philosophizing in America remained Puritan in roots and Calvinist in commitment. But liberal Christian thought emerged on the left (influenced by Deism and Arminianism) led to the birth of Unitarian theology and ultimately Transcendentalism, and reactionary Old Calvinist strands developed on the right. On the fringe, new religious movements appeared: Millerite Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science, Mormonism, Theosophy, etc. And immigrants brought old religious movements with them: Judaism, Catholicism, Islam… even, ultimately, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc.

Furthermore, the legal structure of American religious liberty secured as well a place for dissenters, doubters, agnostics, and atheists. And along with these, the scientists and philosophers whose ideas had such deep consequences for our understanding of the world, and indeed, for the shape of our consciences. In the American system of government, to borrow Paine’s distinction, hated ideas might be opposed by society, but they could not be stopped with government. That’s the true meaning of the liberty of conscience (as Leland conceives of it).

It is interesting to me, then, to look at the 1815 sermon of Nathanael Emmons, On Conscience, which is assigned for class on Wednesday of week five. Here is a thinker in the centrist stream of Christian philosophizing in America, known as a representative of the “New Divinity.” He is heir to the ideals of conformist Puritan thought and the Calvinism of Edwards. And he is a political enemy of the Deist founding father Jefferson. His concept of “conscience” is decidedly conservative, and yet something about it remains fresh and current. He doesn’t argue for liberty of conscience. He argues for the free exercise of it. He believes that conscience is something like a muscle of the heart; if allowed to atrophy from lack of use or from being starved for the oxygen of self-reflection, it will not judge rightly. But if properly exercised, he thinks, it will ultimately lead all people towards the same sort of righteous loving behavior. It’s a subtle concept; he does not directly equate conscience with the knowledge of good and evil. Rather he regards it as a power of judgment that needs to be used to be effective. It’s hard to know, at first, how to fit his use of the term into the previous tradition of its use as found in Jefferson, Williams and Leland. As I understand it, his clunky model of mind (involving Perception, Reason, Memory, and Conscience) seems to be not as supple as Edwards’ (which involves fewer moving parts, just Understanding and the Affections). Yet it has a certain appeal to our intuitions about the minds of other people. We may all differ in our “consciences” (in the older sense of the term, i.e. in what we believe to be the Truth and our Duty towards it), yet we are all the same in possessing a faculty that passes harsh judgment on our behavior when we act against its dictates. The internal censor morum as Leland calls it. Emmons appeals to a popular conception that in spite of differences we are all somehow the same, and that, accordingly, if only we would exercise our faculties rightly, we would somehow all arrive at that originally sought concord of unity in ethical society with one another. Emmons clearly thinks that ethical society will be Calvinist Christian; today a more universalist spirit prevails, and people will often assert, mutatis mutandis, that all religions and ethical systems teach essentially the same thing.

But there is something awry in Emmons’ account of conscience. He tries to make room for the idea of a corrupt conscience, and to acknowledge that some people do act in conformity with their conscience although their acts would be criminal in the eyes of the law or other people. But these people, Emmons thinks, have simply not given full liberty to their conscience to examine their own behavior. And here he stands the idea of liberty of conscience on its head; or perhaps he merely sets it on its side. He seems to be saying: the government gave you freedom of conscience, yet you yourself put it under bondage by restricting its scope of self-examination. Use your conscience, for God’s sake, and be a Christian!

If I were a Calvinist, I would criticize Emmons for Arminianism. Edwards tried to make room for the Calvinist notion of total depravity with his idea that, in their natural state, human beings posses an understanding (and hence, a will) that is always subjective and selfish. The will is always determined by this natural understanding. Hence, there is no free will, per se, to choose a better will. There is only freedom of the soul to do as it will (and it always wills evil). Thus Edwards made room for the transformation wrought in a believer by supernatural grace. The only possible way to expand the understanding to encompass interests beyond the felicity of the self is such a supernatural transformation. But Emmons seems to be arguing that we already possess something which could transform our will, namely, a power for judging our desires and actions. That power might be given by God for Emmons. But, in that case, whereas a Calvinist might suggest that such power comes only from supernatural grace given to the elect, Emmons seems to be saying that the power is already in the possession of every person, and that it can in fact be resisted with our “free will.” In that sense it sounds Arminian, or even Universalist, to me. But it also sounds extraordinarily American.

Afterthought on Native American Philosophy

Please note: I mean no offense when, in this essay I use the term “American” in a way that refers only to the heirs of the European colonial states; so far we have left out of account native American thought in this period for the simple reason that it is too difficult to do it justice; during the early 17th–19th centuries native peoples in “America” were not abstractly reflecting on their moral agency and liberties in the context of an increasingly industrialized “Western economy;” they were engaged in a far more practical struggle for liberty as they fought many losing battles for their lives and property.

On my reading list:

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976; paperback in 1977; LCCCN: 75-25456).

Eric Foner probably should have been one of my professors when I was at Columbia, but alas, Epimetheus!

I suppose most schools offer more opportunities than students can use. Nevertheless, I do have an old copy, originally used in one of Foner’s classes! and, during my time there: 1987-1991. It feels like a bridge to a past course not taken, even if it is not. (Julie Anglin, if you ever read this, I have your old copy.)

I am looking at Foner this week, but this post isn’t actually about this book. It’s about the idea of Liberty in early America.

Foner begins this outstanding book with an epigram from a seventy year old Thomas Paine (1737-1809), written in 1806, three years before his death:

My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense, the first work I ever published, have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.

  —Paine and Revolutionary America, frontmatter (p. vii).

These stirring, revolutionary words remind me well of the inscription inside the cupola of the Memorial of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in D.C.:

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

These words come from one of Jefferson’s many letters; in this case one of Sep. 23rd, 1800, to Dr. Benjamin Rush (see this copy on google books).

For both Jefferson and Paine, tyranny took forms both intellectual (especially in religious matters) and governmental. This is why the revolution they fomented ended up enshrining the principle of religious liberty, extending Roger Williams’ experiment with the “wall of separation” in Rhode Island to the rest of New England and the Colonies, via the First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights, and placing alongside it freedom of assembly and of the press.

We may be sure that deist revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were sincere in their confidence that a right to freedom is granted to human beings from God, or, from “Nature’s God” as Jefferson refers to him in the Declaration of Independence.

In our course, it is illuminating to approach Paine and Jefferson as we do: immediately following the discussion of free will among Dissenting Christians, most especially the New Calvinist Edwards’ quarrel with Arminians as expressed in his book Freedom of the Will.

Edwards is against the idea of “free will,” but is no opponent of Freedom. To understand Edwards, I argue, you need to know simply that a human agent can be free, and can have a will, but cannot be said thereby to have a “free will.” The phrase “free will” predicates the property of a subject (a human self or “soul”), to a fellow property of a subject (namely: “will”). But properties are not like subjects; they can’t have their own properties. Now, human souls certainly have freedom, that is, liberty. Edwards defines Liberty (in ch. 5 of Part I of Freedom of the Will ) in congruity with John Locke. It is merely the ability to accomplish one’s will. When an action lies within someone’s power, and nothing impedes that action, there is liberty. So, unimpeded action is liberty. Edwards, following Locke, is not interested in any notion of an unlimited or unconditioned Freedom; rather, freedom is always limited by the world and the nature of persons. Freedom can be taken away (for example, by confinement, or, by tyranny) and it can granted again. For Edwards, God creates and sustains the power by which the human will (expressing, as it does for Edwards, the desire to do act on our understanding of whatever we deem best for us) can be expressed; that power to act, to choose action, is will.

Famously, the “Declaration of Independence” (see three drafts compared synoptically on google books) contains these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Notice that Jefferson doesn’t refer to humans being created free, but only that they are created equal. What the Creator gives is an inalienable right to liberty. This is stated to be self-evident. How can this right to liberty be detected? The answer lies in the proper understanding of liberty, and in observing in humans the power they have to secure it. And so here in Jefferson we are indeed looking at Locke again!

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is a phrase that is commonly asserted to bear an echo of Locke. And it does; in fact, Locke used similar phrases in various essays.

In Locke’s essay on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), he writes (in the context of an aside in which he remarks on the fact that so few human beings follow the dictates of the Virtuous Life):

Mankind, who are and must be allowed to pursue their Happiness, nay, cannot be hindered, cannot but think themselves excused from a strict Observation of Rules, which appeared so little to consist with their chief End, Happiness, whilst they kept them from the Enjoyments of this Life.  
[see google]

Here it is clear that Locke regarded the pursuit of happiness (not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it) as a kind of fundamental right. This right (recognizable by a power to pursue it) is not and should not be impeded, even though we might wish that we ourselves and others would pursue rather Virtue than Happiness.

Locke himself argued for a rather more robust notion of the Natural Rights of humans than did Jefferson, who omits all of Locke’s talk of “property”; Locke again:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrolled Enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other Man or Number of Men of the World, hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty, and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men, but to judge of, and punish the Breaches of that Law in Others, as he is persuaded the Offense deserves, even with Death it self, in Crimes where the Heinousness of the Fact, in his Opinion, requires it. (Of Civil Government [1689], Chapter VII, Paragraph 87).

Notice that for Locke in Nature we are born with Title (clearly, a Right) to Freedom, but also with a violent and potentially deadly Power that we need in order to secure Life, Liberty and Property from “Attempts.” I think it is this Power itself that gives evidence to the Title.

In the Lockean thought about Liberty that is more or less shared by Jefferson and Paine, the common element is Locke’s idea of the power of the human being to resist tyranny and oppression. It is a theory of government (and authority) that – tentatively – permits revolution (although it also admits of, and perhaps usually prefers less violent courses for remedying injustice and casting off shackles).

This idea of what “Freedom” is explains why God (or Nature’s God, as the Declaration names it, again in harmony with Locke) cannot simply give (and simply has not given) Liberty to us, but rather can and has given us a power (thought of as a right) to defend and pursue Freedom. (Perhaps also a duty to do so?)

For Edwards, this power to pursue happiness is manifest in individuals in the will itself, considered as the power to choose that course of action deemed best for us in our (limited, natural, human, fallen, corrupted) understanding. For Locke, Jefferson and Paine, the power is indeed manifest in persons, especially in their inalienable power to resist the oppressor. But it is also evident in a Free State, where the powers of humans are used to grant equality under a sovereign Law (written by a legislature that works with the consent of the governed), granting to individuals freedom from the arbitrary will of other persons, by actively defending them against such arbitrary opposition.