This week we looked at the transition from the ‘Nation-State’ to the ‘Market-State,’ with all its attendant implications.
The ‘Nation-State’ (1914-89) was the era that you and I grew up in. Sometimes its easy to assume that our experience is somehow universal, but in fact that America was different than the America of Thomas Jefferson, and the America of our children will be different as well.
What characterizes this era?
We see here that, in Bobbitt’s words, “Government’s are responsible to and for the people.” In contrast to Washington, Jefferson, etc., whereas before, people found their identity in ‘the state,’ now ‘the state’ finds its identity in ‘the people’ (my thanks to Addison Smith for this insight). Gone is the more aristocratic, patriarchal attitude of the founders. One can see beginnings of this shift in Jacksonian Democracy. The closing of Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ puts forward a new basis for government’s relationship to the people.
Essentially, the Nation-State will end up creating a sense of unity and community. Many of us remember growing up playing with kids from ‘the neighborhood.’ ‘We are the World,’ and ‘Hands Across America’ were major cultural phenomena. We listened in with all our friends to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 to see what the #1 song was for the week.
Politically, if we are a family, we take care of the family. So programs like Social Security to take care of the elderly and Welfare to care for the poor make sense within this rationale. Iconic presidents on both sides of the political spectrum arise like FDR and Reagan that can rally the whole nation behind them.
It is easy to romanticize this era, and it has many strengths. But this was also the era of ‘Total War,’ for if whole populations make up ‘the State,’ then whole populations can be the targets. The horrific devastation of World War I & II come out of this mentality. Also, mass groups define themselves at times by who is outside the group as well inside. So the Nation-State era also experienced terrible levels of ethnically motivated violence of which the Holocaust is only the worst example.
The ‘Long War’ of 1914-89, like all epochal conflicts, inevitably forces states to innovate. And so they did. The weapons that won this war (nuclear weapons, the computer, international trade) just as in the past, ended up destabilizing the nation-state order and helped bring about our current one, what Bobbitt calls the ‘Market-State.’
We might contrast the two orders by recalling some common experiences then and now. In the Nation-State, you had to go to a few centralized locations to ‘consume culture,’ for example. If you wanted to hear a couple songs from an artist, you had to buy the whole album. If you want news, go to one of the 4-5 major outlets, most of which said much the same thing. It was the era of the ‘water-cooler’ show, where everyone tuned in to see the Cosby Show, for example (‘Seinfeld’ may have been the last show truly like this).
Now, thanks to technology, identity politics, Vietnam and Watergate, among many factors, we have many more choices. We can individualize our lives in ways not possible even 15 years ago.
I wanted the students to think about the implications for modern America, and the modern state in general.
First, we noted that governments now have a much harder time controlling the message they want heard. Government’s simply won’t be able to mobilize mass opinion as they could before. The Arab Spring is one example of this, but there are countless other smaller ones. Note the leaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example. Perhaps a downside to this is that with the wealth of options available, we never have to listen to the ‘other side’ if we don’t want to. Might this contribute to the current rancor in politics today? Both Bush and Obama have been compared to Hitler, which in my opinion does not foster healthy, responsible debate on their relative merits. Still, every president or senator is bound to have plenty of critics. In one sense then, governments have much less power than they used to.
But on the other hand, technology puts a tremendous amount of information at the government’s disposal. What will happen to the concept of privacy, for example? The globalized market de-emphasizes territorial boundaries among states. In the same way, traditional notions of private and public boundaries are also changing. Will our interpretation of the 4th Amendment also change?
Regardless of where we might stand on these developments, we must avoid a) Vainly wishing for a mythically pristine bygone era, or b) Assuming that every change is inherently good because it is change. The Market-State, like any other model, will give and take away, and we need to be discerning to maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.
This week we continued looking at the development of states, attempting to make the connection between the various elements in society that propel change. We looked this week at the ‘State-Nation,’ and the ‘Nation-State.’
Th ‘Territorial-State’ (1648-1776) was a conscious move away from the monarchical ambition and religious motivated violence of the previous era. They sought order, symmetry, balance, and proportion. This required careful international diplomacy, and sought to prevent any inward social upheavals, for good or ill.
A variety of factors lead to the breakup of this constitutional order. For one, the Enlightenment grew stale and begged for a more ‘Romantic’ counter-reaction. But perhaps more than that, the expansion of Territorial States stretched the logic of their identity based on contiguous property (and not ideology, which travels in the minds of men). The French-Indian War is perhaps the most striking example of a Territorial-State conflict that gives birth to the ‘State-Nation’ here in America.
The French-Indian War created a sense of identity, a sense of a ‘people’ in the English North American colonies. This ‘people’ would naturally now not want to be treated as pawns in an international game. They would inevitably demand rights, and this is at least part of the roots of the conflict between the colonies and England.
A look at the Declaration of Independence and Constitution gives us insight into the emerging world of ‘State-Nations.’
We have the basis of the particular relationship between government and the people rooted in universal ideas (all men are created equal)
We have recognition that the ‘people,’ not territory or states, are the basis for political power, i.e. “We the people. . .”
At the same time we still have a somewhat aristocratic, paternalistic attitude towards ‘the people.’ Government was responsible “for” the people, but neither George Washington, John Adams, Robespierre, or Napoleon would have thought in terms of government “by” the people, or “of” the people.
Napoleon is a great example of someone who understood how the socio-political landscape had changed, and understood how to take advantage of it. The French Revolution destroyed not only the aristocracy, but the professional army led by aristocrats. Napoleon had mass, energy, and ideology at his disposal, but lacked the well drilled and trained armies of the rest of Europe.
With a “people” now organized in France to form a “nation,” Napoleon could mobilize more support for his campaigns. He had the supplies, backing, and motive to take his army far (we are liberators of the oppressed). His took this energy and channeled, achieving superiority of mass at points of his choosing. This rag-tag ball of energy created by the French Revolution and harnessed by Napoleon made quick work of the rational, balanced, symmetrical, and aristocratic armies of Europe.
But then a curious thing happened. The countries Napoleon occupied inevitably brought with them the ideology and ‘constitution’ they espoused. If France was so great, why couldn’t Prussia or Austria be great too? If they wanted to resist, they would need to raise a new army rooted in this new sense of solidarity, this new sense of a ‘people.’ The old aristocratic officers had been discredited by their initial defeat at Napoleon’s hands. The armies that defeated Napoleon from 1809-1815 from Spain to Russia, from Prussia to England, were in sense, Napoleon’s accidental creations.
Napoleon’s success and ultimate failure have many lessons. For our purposes I want the students to see how elements of society fit together and in a sense, carry the same message. Different ideas and actions create new social and political contexts. Without awareness of the ripple effects of these changes, nations will end up behind the 8 ball, much like Spain of the early 17th century, France and England in the late 18th century, the Austro-Hungarians in the early 20th century, and so on.
We discussed in class the various ways the transition from these two state models might manifest itself. The “State-Nation” built itself on universal ideas, (i.e. “all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”) These grand, sweeping ideas have their incarnation in Beethoven’s music, for example.
But the music of the next model, the “Nation-State” reflected different values. It was more group oriented, so the music aimed not everywhere but for the broad middle, creating more “popular” and “accessible” music.
Later we had. . .
And then. . .
The ‘Nation-State’ (1914-89) was the era that you and I grew up in. Sometimes its easy to assume that we experience is somehow universal, but in fact that America was different than the America of Thomas Jefferson, and the America of our children will be different as well.
What characterizes this era?
We see here that, in Bobbitt’s words, “Government’s are responsible to and for the people.” In contrast to Washington, Jefferson, etc., whereas before, people found their identity in ‘the state,’ now ‘the state’ finds its identity in ‘the people’ (my thanks to Addison Smith for this insight). Gone is the more aristocratic, patriarchal attitude of the founders. One can see beginnings of this shift in Jacksonian Democracy. The closing of Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ puts forward a new basis for government’s relationship to the people.
Essentially, the Nation-State will end up creating a sense of unity and community. Many of us remember growing up playing with kids from ‘the neighborhood.’ ‘We are the World,’ and ‘Hands Across America’ were major cultural phenomena. We listened in with all our friends to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 to see what the #1 song was for the week.
Politically, if we are a family, we take care of the family. So programs like Social Security to take care of the elderly and Welfare to care for the poor make sense within this rationale. Iconic presidents on both sides of the political spectrum arise like FDR and Reagan that can rally the whole nation behind them.
It is easy to romanticize this era, and it has many strengths. But this was also the era of ‘Total War,’ for if whole populations make up ‘the State,’ then whole populations can be the targets. The horrific devastation of World War I & II come out of this mentality. Also, mass groups define themselves at times by who is outside the group as well inside. So the Nation-State era also experienced terrible levels of ethnically motivated violence of which the Holocaust is only the worst example.
The ‘Long War’ of 1914-89, like all epochal conflicts, inevitably forces states to innovate. And so they did. The weapons that won this war (nuclear weapons, the computer, international trade) just as in the past, ended up destabilizing the nation-state order and helped bring about our current one, what Bobbitt calls the ‘Market-State.’
We might contrast the two orders by recalling some common experiences then and now. In the Nation-State, you had to go to a few centralized locations to ‘consume culture,’ for example. If you wanted to hear a couple songs from an artist, you had to buy the whole album. If you want news, go to one of the 4-5 major outlets, most of which said much the same thing. It was the era of the ‘water-cooler’ show, where everyone tuned in to see the Cosby Show, for example (‘Seinfeld’ may have been the last show truly like this).
Now, thanks to technology, identity politics, Vietnam and Watergate, among many factors, we have many more choices. We can individualize our lives in ways not possible even 15 years ago.
I wanted the students to think about the implications for modern America, and the modern state in general.
First, we noted that governments now have a much harder time controlling the message they want heard. Government’s simply won’t be able to mobilize mass opinion as they could before. The Arab Spring is one example of this, but there are countless other smaller ones. Note the leaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example. Perhaps a downside to this is that with the wealth of options available, we never have to listen to the ‘other side’ if we don’t want to. Might this contribute to the current rancor in politics today? Both Bush and Obama have been compared to Hitler, which in my opinion does not foster healthy, responsible debate on their relative merits. Still, every president or senator is bound to have plenty of critics. In one sense then, governments have much less power than they used to.
But on the other hand, technology puts a tremendous amount of information at the government’s disposal. What will happen to the concept of privacy, for example? The globalized market de-emphasizes territorial boundaries among states. In the same way, traditional notions of private and public boundaries are also changing. Will our interpretation of the 4th Amendment also change?
Regardless of where we might stand on these developments, we must avoid a) Vainly wishing for a bygone era, or b) Assuming that every change is inherently good because it is change. The Market-State, like any other model, will give and take away, and we need to be discerning to maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.
Byron Farwell’s The Great Anglo-Boer War offers an intriguing glimpse into the waning days of Victorian England, deals with some difficult moral dilemmas, and entertains with good writing and good stories. When one combines the myopia of Victorian Brits and the self-righteousness of the Dutch Boers, it can lead, if nothing else, to entertaining reading. The whole episode reminded me of the failed Rob Schieder TV show Men Behaving Badly. I saw exactly 0 episodes of this show, but I do remember the promo, which had Schieder’s character standing by a sink full of dirty dishes. He narrated,
What does a guy do when all of his dishes are dirty? Well, the way I see it, he could a) Buy more dishes, b) Rent another apartment, or c) Find suitable dish-like replacement from your natural surroundings (holds up a frisbee).
My guess is that was about as good as the show got.
Who is one to root for in this conflict?
On the surface, you have an imperial nation at the high-water mark of its power, fighting in land not their own against a group of rag-tag farmers who only wish to be left alone. Our underdog instinct wants to kick in, but then we remember the Dutch Boers woeful mistreatment of the indigenous local African population and back off on any potential support. So perhaps we can root for the Brits? After all, “Empire” is not, or should not be, a dirty word in and of itself. Sometimes empire-states can serve the common good. And one can make a legitimate argument that England’s empire on balance did more good than harm, where no such argument exists for say, the French or Germans.
But then you see their reasons for their fight against the Dutch, and you throw up your hands. The British and the Dutch had their separate spheres of influence in South Africa, and managed to tolerate each other. But then miners found gold in the Dutch portion and a variety of treasure-seeking Brits came to seek their fortunes. The Dutch understandably did not embrace their presence. Almost exclusively they farmed and cared nothing for mining. They had a narrow, pious view of how life should be led that did not mesh well with the more rambunctious materialistic miners. Some kind of conflict between them would be inevitable.
The British couldn’t face the idea of their citizens not getting the royal treatment. Without citizenship, the miners naturally could not vote, and the Dutch passed a law aimed squarely at the miners making the residency requirement for voting 14 years. The British were outraged, and some minor scuffles ensued, followed by negotiations. The Dutch agreed to lower the residency requirement to seven years, two shy of the five years the British wanted.
It took someone like Foreign Secretary Alfred Milner to make this difference into a war. A brilliant scholar, perhaps his German ancestry led him to develop an outsized passion for all things British, especially the Empire. Was it his mixed ethnic background that subconsciously put so much racial language into his speech? He once stated,
I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest governing race that the world has ever seen, and I believe there are no limits to its future. It is the British race which built the Empire, and the undivided British race which can alone uphold it. . . Deeper, stronger, more primordial than material ties is the bond of common blood, a common language, a common history and traditions.”
His Credo, published posthumously, somehow unfortunately only added to his popularity. . .
I am a Nationalist and not a cosmopolitan …. I am a British (indeed primarily an English) Nationalist. If I am also an Imperialist, it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and long supremacy at sea, has been to strike roots in different parts of the world. I am an Imperialist and not a Little Englander because I am a British Race Patriot … The British State must follow the race, must comprehend it, wherever it settles in appreciable numbers as an independent community. If the swarms constantly being thrown off by the parent hive are lost to the State, the State is irreparably weakened. We cannot afford to part with so much of our best blood. We have already parted with much of it, to form the millions of another separate but fortunately friendly State. We cannot suffer a repetition of the process.
As an aside we can see that the Nazi’s did not invent all of their horrible language about “race,” and “blood.”
To our point, with this attitude Milner could make a mountain out of a molehill. His extreme sense of British dignity could be quite easily tweaked. When some in England felt that with the concession of the Boers war could be avoided Milner stated, “No no no. If enforced rigidly their government would be able to exclude anyone they deemed undesirable.” As Farwell noted, why Milner thought that the sovereign Dutch state could not exclude people they deemed undesirable implied that the Dutch had no sovereignty where England was concerned.
Milner’s counterpart Joseph Chamberlain also saw these minor disputes in absolute terms. He argued for war as well, stating,
We are going to war in defense of principles, the principle upon which this Empire has been founded, and upon which it alone can exist. The first principle is this–if we are to maintain our existence as a great power in South Africa, we are bound to show that we are both willing and able to protect British subjects everywhere when they are made to suffer injustice and oppression. The second is that in the interests of the British Empire, Great Britain must remain the paramount Power in South Africa. [The Dutch] are menacing the peace of the world.
That last sentence is almost breathtaking in its foolishness. How could a small group of Dutch farmers who denied British citizens the vote in Dutch elections and taxed them 5% on their profits menace the peace of the world? Not unless the British see their own peace as the world’s peace, or their own inability to get their way everywhere as tantamount to a rupture of “world peace.”
I could not bring myself to root for the British. Even British opponents of the war, like Major General William Butler, show this same insufferable posture. Butler forecasted many troubles the British faced in the war, and afterwords commented, “I was able to judge of a possible war between us and the Boers with a power of forecast of a quite exceptional character.”
The war progressed in the way we might expect. The rugged South African terrain gave the Dutch farmers plenty of hiding space, and British arrogance and unfamiliarity with their surroundings made for a few massacres. The Dutch were better shots and had better rifles. But then, British persistence kicked in. They poured in more money, more troops, and even had an upswing in Victorian enthusiasm, and eventually wore the Boers down. They took pages out of Sherman’s book by burning crops and farms (they targeted more broadly than Sherman did) and starving troops in the field. They anticipated the Nazi’s not only in racial language, but also in the use of concentration camps.
But the peace settlement showed that England had only won battles, and in fact, lost the war. They could not stay in South Africa, and eventually the Dutch gained their complete independence. As for “upholding British prestige,” the Germans did not think much of it and thus crashed through Belgium in 1914. So England lost what it both indirectly and directly fought for within a few years of the war’s conclusion.
What lessons can we deduce from this conflict?
1. The expansiveness of late-stage empires
The end of the Victorian era saw a huge expansion of the the Empire. As the reign waned, they had to loosen their belts. The same happened, albeit with less success, under Louis XIV in France, and with Augustus’ bid to get into Germany at the end of his life.
I have no good explanation for this. My only stab might be that when we get older, we don’t really change, but our characteristics come into sharper focus, be they good or bad. The same might hold for civilizations at the end of epoch. Expansive minded rulers might take a while to find their sea legs, but then once they/the civilization have made their characters, their expansive nature could accentuate itself more and more as time went on.
2. The Persistence of the Armies of Empire
The British troops showed remarkable tenacity and a passion for glory, much like the Roman army in its heyday. Mounting British casualties early on did nothing to abate this. I think we can say that rather than the expansiveness creating the armies, the armies provide the possibility of it in the first place.
3. Empires in their late stages make mountains of molehills
Pericles did this with the Megaran Decree, and Victoria did it in South Africa. To some extent, Napoleon did this with Russia. When empire-states do this, they always justify their extreme action under the aegis of defending their reputation throughout the world. For them, their action proves their vitality, but in reality, it may only prove that they have grown old, cranky, inflexible, and overly touchy.
4. The futility of force alone
On certain extreme political ends, some might say that, “violence never solves anything.” This is quite obviously untrue. But violence alone, apart from any other political or moral power, will rarely solve problems, especially for the aggressor far from home. The British experience in India should have taught them this lesson, for they established themselves there with very little force, and rarely had to use it to stay.
Milner wanted to make South Africa something of a second India, but their brutal tactics could never win over the local population. The Dutch never wanted to be British the way some Indians did. Even many Indians that eventually fought for independence used their British educations to do so.
I like the ‘Redux’ version of Apocalypse Now, and I think this scene sums up in some ways the position of the Dutch and the British.
Like sand falling though our fingers, South Africa slipped away despite their military victory.
Towards the end of this week we began preparation for our look at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by examining how nations change over time, and why.
To help guide us we will be using Philip Bobbitt’s framework from his book, “The Shield of Achilles.” I have picked this because we need to have some kind of general categories to work from, and Bobbitt provides them, though one can debate his specific conclusions. One of the strengths of Bobbitt’s work for our project is that he is more concerned with showing the possibilities than arriving at specific conclusions. Bobbitt chose the title because he wanted to emphasize the connections between various aspects of society, and he refers to the famous shield given to Achilles by his mother Thetis. We might expect that the shield would have military insignia exclusively, but in fact that shield had depictions of numerous scenes of life in general, as the diagram shows.
I want the students to see these same connections.
Bobbitt makes several points worth noting.
Many historians will seek for the one defining turning point in the history of the western idea of the state. Bobbitt points out, rightly I think, that there are many such turning points in history, and that we are in the midst of one now. By understanding how these changes happened before, we can better prepare for our own future
People remain who they are from birth, but the way they relate to the world will change over time. For example, as a young boy I thought of myself as a future NFL wide receiver. What if I still thought of myself that way? What if I left my job, trained hard, and showed up at Redskins training camp next year hoping to make the team? This would be silly, but also destructive. What would happen to my family, for example? So too, nations must accurately assess their own identity and match it to the reality they face. When nations fail to do so — when their concept of their own identity does not fit well with reality, that nation suffers.
Bobbitt also encourages us to see the various state models over time as opportunities. Often people, like nations, get stuck wishing and acting based on a bygone past. How much better if we could accept things we could not change and make the most of them? What are those things that can be changed, and things that cannot? How should we act and plan accordingly?
We proceed recognizing that elements of a state’s internal order (politics, economics, culture, military, etc.) will all share a common rationale. When we looked at the “Territorial State” (1648-1776) model we saw its origins in the rejection of the “Kingly State” (1588ish-1648) and its identity.
The Kingly state built itself around the king. The “bigger” the king, the grander the people. So, for example, the French took pride in the fact that Louis XIV could eat far more than other men. It made him seem larger than life, and this in turn spilled over into the people. Frequently other monarchs of this era (like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I) pictured themselves in outsized proportions.
If the king’s religion formed the religion of the people, than those that did not share in that religion must either have second-class status (like Catholics in England, or Protestants in France) or be banned entirely from participation in the state. Furthermore, the wars of the state could in theory be universal in scope, because religion is not bound by geography.
The transition to the “Territorial State” came about due primarily to the physical and moral exhaustion brought about by the wars of religion. Now states feared above all “enthusiasms,” or anything that might upset the apple cart. Now rulers sought to keep wars local and short, because the only justification for war had to be acquisition of contiguous territory. The universal ambitions of previous monarchs made no sense anymore.
The age of the Territorial State is the age of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, with a focus on what can be known and measured. Economically, the “mercantile” philosophy dominated the era, with its strict control on imports. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations would do much to undermine this philosophy, and coincidentally, appeared at the same time as the American Revolution.
This transition can be seen visually:
The ‘Kingly-State’ King, Louis XIV, where the “bigger” kings are, the more power they have (notice how Louis seems to say, “Look at me in all my glory!”):
The ‘Territorial State” King, Frederick the Great (notice that does not seek to reveal himself to the painter–he almost turns himself away):
‘Kingly State’ Architecture:
‘Territorial State’ Architecture:
This is a tough concept, but I hope the students will get the hang of it.
The book “Blood and Iron Origin of the German Empire As Revealed by the Character of Its Founder, Bismarck,” by John Hubert Greusel is not so much a biography of Bismarck as it is a pean to an idea, an homage to a theory of History.
Historiography has its fashions just like other disciplines. In the late 19th century the “History is Made by Great Men” theory gained prominence among a certain set.
To best of my knowledge, the theory runs something like this:
Existence, political or otherwise, is about struggle for survival and little else.
Civilizations have moral codes to help check our naturally competitive instincts, and these serve a good purpose — most of the time. But times arise that call for a transcending of such codes. We don’t like to admit it to ourselves, but the vast majority of us lack the strength of will and purpose needed to accomplish what needs done. Society craves champions.
“Great Men” arise to meet such a challenge. Such men have vast intellects and plentiful energy. They can mold the minds of men and make Lady Fortune their mistress. Their grand vision naturally requires sacrifice, but they sacrifice themselves most of all to their ideals. They sacrifice the prevailing mores of the time to this ideal as well. Their “greatness of soul” excuse all their crimes and vices, some of which are only mere convention anyway.
Such “Great Men” are beloved by some, hated and reviled by most others. Inevitably, “lesser” men gang up on them and bring them down, but the “Great Men” manage to have the last laugh. They gain immortality by their deeds and the impact they leave behind.
Colonel Jessup believed in this theory. . . (warning: language)
Historians typically use a few different people to expound this philosophy. Julius Caesar fits the bill, as does Napoleon, who said, “The world begged me to govern it.” Some write about Alexander the Great this way, a man with a vision of the brotherhood of man, only to face betrayal from his own army. Hannibal gets this treatment too, as his own government first would not give him reinforcements and then after the war betrayed him to of all people, the Romans. At least Hannibal, unlike Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander, got a noble death by his own hands. He remained “unconquered.”
Bismarck most definitely could be written about this way, and that is how Greusel treats him.
Fashions change of course, and historiography changed. By the mid-20th century historians had stopped focusing on the great men and swung the pendulum to examine culture, environment, and the everyday (think Fernand Braudel). Interestingly, the “Great Man” approach coincided with the advent of Nietzche’s philosophy of the “over-man” and the heyday of imperialism. Historians’ focus switched as empires collapsed and the civil rights movement began.
First, a word about Greusel specifically.
His writing has an endearing quality, because he cannot contain himself. He gets carried away with his subject, with both Bismarck and the Idea. Each page has multiple exclamation points to accompany the exalted language. A typical paragraph might look like . . .
And here is Bismarck, striding over the plain of Sedan. Look at his steps, like a Colossus! His face — o his face! — triumphant in his glory. But look close. Is that a tear in his eye? A tear for the slain, the cost of victory? Weep, o weep Bismarck, if you must, but not here, not now. Watch him suppress his anguish, for what is the cost? This is Germany’s hour! Watch Bismarck complete the triumph. For he will drink champagne — yes champagne! — right in Versailles where Louis XIV looked with eagle eye over his foppish band. Bismarck guzzles the liquid, as he guzzles glory! For here we have a man who loves and hates like no other!
Entertaining in doses, but not entirely informative.
Greusel does not entirely gloss over Bismarck’s faults, but he keeps returning to the idea that, “You need Bismarck on that wall, you want Bismarck on that wall!” Germany needed united, after all, and it took a force of nature to overrule a pathetic Parliament and outmoded provincial princes. Thus Bismarck fulfilled, “the secret yearning of the Teutonic Heart,” (his words, not mine) and the immensity of the task meant that immense deeds needed done, and lesser men must give way to The Deed.
I’ll give Greusel credit for this: he does not hide his thoughts in flowery prose. He has no qualms with making his views obvious, such as his intolerance for weakness or the “pettiness” of democracies. His heroes are the Great Men, who serve the god Will, embodied in the German national consciousness.
I have profound antipathy for the “Great Men” theory of History for many reasons, but we must first understand its appeal. We admire strength because we do need it at times. Part of us can’t help but agree with Colonel Jessup. Certain times call for clarity of vision and courage to make difficult decisions when all others see a foggy grey landscape. The question is, what kind of strength do we need?
With that in mind, problems with the theory abound:
The theory absolves one of responsibility. Bismarck’s individuality gets merged into something resembling Fate. For all of Greusel’s croonings about how Bismarck was a “man” his treatment of him abstracts Bismarck to the point where he no longer is an individual, but a Type. As a colleague of mine rightly pointed out, a great gulf exists between the Great Men and Biographical approach to History. The biographical approach values their subjects as men/women, rather than seeing them through the lens of imagined archetypes.
This absolving of responsibility allows the characters of this treatment (Napoleon, Alexander, etc.) to indulge via proxy in childish shifting of blame. “It’s not my fault! He did it!” Again, not particularly manly.
The theory has no appreciation for anything like moral strength, or the power in humility. The growth of the Church within the Roman Empire, or the Civil Rights movement stand as clear examples of the power of humility. Selfishness and pride get pride of place with “Great Men.”
Great Men adherents tend to think that force is always the correct solution. Napoleon may have been right that Europe needed unity, and that every war between European nations had the character of a civil war. But his conquests provoked far more war than existed previously. Bismarck wanted to Germany to unite, and I suppose that Germany had a right to unity if they mutually desired it. But Bismarck did not want unity through a democratic process. He wanted to create Germany through the forge of blood and iron. Only in that way could he serve his god.
The theory predicates itself on the unremitting “struggle of life.” But if History means looking at actual people in time, we should ask if “struggle” defines human existence. Obviously struggle is part of life, but it also seems like most of the time people watch tv, hang out with friends, read books, visit relatives, etc.
Not so much on the theory but on Greusel specifically — why exactly did Germany need united, and why did it need to get that unification at the expense of a patient democratic process? Greusel never addresses this question directly.
Historian Herbert Butterfield commented,
It is easy to make plans of quasi-political salvation of the world. . . . And when such plans go wrong, it is easy to find a culprit–easy for the idealist to bring out from under his sleeve that doctrine of human sinfulness which would have been much better to face squarely and fairly in the first instance. At a later stage in the argument the disillusioned idealist trounces the people who opposed him, brings human wickedness into the question as a deux ex machina. . . . And now he discovers human wickedness with a vengeance, for on this system the sinners are fewer in number, and thus must be diabolically wicked to make up for it. Nothing more completely locks humanity in some of its bewildering predicaments and dilemmas than to range history as a fight between the righteous and the wicked, rather than seeing initially that human nature–including oneself–is imperfect generally.
Greusel wrote in 1915, when Germany looked like it might “fulfill its destiny on the world stage.” The sad irony of this book is that Germany’s worship of force led them to near annihilation over the next 30 years. Beware of calling forces to your aid you call you cannot control. Their gods Will and Force turned out to be demons. St. Augustine commented in The City of God, referring to the Romans folly of adopting the gods that could not save Troy,
For who does not see, when he thinks of it, what assumption it is that they could not be vanquished under vanquished defenders, and that they only perished because they had lost their guardian gods, when, indeed, the only cause of their perishing was they chose for themselves protectors condemned to perish.
Finally Greusel’s abstraction of Bismarck has him overlook aspects of the man that don’t fit his theory. I’m no great fan of Bismarck, but after 1871 he showed a measure of restraint in foreign policy. He thought imperialistic ventures foolish and self-defeating, for example. Germany only embarked on extensive colonialism as he lost power in the government. Was this a “conversion experience” that Greusel overlooked, or is Bismarck just more complicated that he lets on? I suspect the latter.
Therefore the book, while entertaining in parts, may reveal more about Greusel than Bismarck himself.
This week we looked at the death of Cyrus and the reign of his son and successor, Cambyses II.
When examining Cambyses, we must use some caution. Much of the information (though not all) about what we know about Cambyses comes from Herodotus’ writing, but Herodotus got much of his information from Egypt. Cambyses had conquered Egypt, and we can assume that the information the Egyptians gave Cambyses would be slanted against him. It appears that Cambyses had a terrible temper, exhibited erratic behavior, and may have killed both his brother and sister. What are we to make of this dilemma?
If Cambyses was all who Herodotus says, this would not be terribly surprising. Historically, Cambyses does fit the general pattern of the behavior of privileged sons of self-made men. His father Cyrus worked from the ground up and achieved world-power status by his own innovative policies and bold tactics. His son, on the other hand, would simply be handed the keys to something he had not earned. In class I likened Cyrus to an expert Formula-1 driver who had been driving since he was a boy, worked his way up the lesser racing circuits, etc. Cambyses, on the other hand, would simply be handed the keys to a Formula-1 car upon Cyrus’ death without all the work Cyrus had done.
Under such circumstances, a fiery crash of some kind would be quite likely.
We can speculate as armchair psychologists that Cyrus, given his tremendous energy and success at spreading the power of the Medo-Persians, would not have been home much. We might surmise some latent guilt over this, and this means that if Cambyses ever came to him and said, “My tutor did ‘x’ and I didn’t like it, do something,” Cyrus might feel compelled to take his side and defer to Cambyses instead of his teachers. And, if he was raised always to be deferred to, if he was always told how wonderful he was, he would never blame himself for his bad driving. It would have to be the pit crew’s fault, the car’s fault, the designer’s fault — anyone or anything but himself. This frustration would lead to anger, and erratic behavior might result. It is noteworthy that Cambyses’ successor Darius I, a much better king than Cambyes, came from outside Cyrus’ family and was more “self-made” than Cambyses.
However, Herodotus also records several incidents of Cambyses going out of his way to desecrate Egyptian religious sites and customs after his conquest of Egypt, and this seems less plausible to me.. Cambyses, for example, is supposed to have exhumed a dead Pharaoh’s tomb and abused his corpse, and personally killed the “Apis Bull,” sacred to Egyptians. These actions would have involved such a dramatic departure from Persian practice under Cyrus, that I wonder about their authenticity.
We discussed this dilemma in class. I tend to think that if one source is all we have to go, we should accept that source unless someone else can contradict it. Unless Herodotus can be shown generally untrustworthy (and I believe him to be generally trustworthy) than we should not discount his evidence without other evidence. We should not indict him on mere suspicion. His actions in Egypt seem very uncharacteristic, but again, we have other evidence in Persian art of the period as well (see above image). Perhaps Cambyses was just as bad a Herodotus and the Egyptians claimed.
A colleague of mine who also teaches history recently asked me to play an enjoyable game of “Name your Top Five Historical Events between the Roman Empire and the Reformation in western Europe.”
With some brief banter back and forth we came to an agreement fairly quickly on four and I inserted a fifth. They are, in order of when they occurred,
The conversion of Constantine, ca. 313 A.D.
Charlemagne named Holy Roman Emperor, 800 A.D.
The first Crusade, 1097 A.D.^
The Black Plague ca. 1348 A.D.
Columbus, 1492
As we considered these five, I rejoiced at our selections. For, while the list is quite prosaic and hardly original, it reflects a shared worldview between us, and a shared philosophy of history.
For you see, the list has no technological innovations. Not even the printing press! I had to pat ourselves in the back in a moment of self-satisfaction.
Some context . . .
I like James Burke’s old show from the 1970’s Connections. In a typical episode Burke will start with some everyday modern phenomena and then ask, “How did this come to be?” He will then, by a serious of ingenious jumps and skips back in time, declare that, “If it were not for the discovery of the wood grouse in 1756 B.C., the modern computer would never have come to be.”
Or something like that.
I exaggerate, but sometimes Burke gets carried away.
In the first episode, Burke travels from a power outage in NYC to the invention of the plow in ancient Egypt (it actually makes some sense). But implicit in Burke’s theme lies the idea that technology creates and then drives civilization. I don’t buy it. Yes, the plow probably helped ancient people produce more crops, but what brought people together in the first place? Ok, people would gather by rivers for sure, but what would make them organize themselves into communities?
It would not be the plow. Before the plow, some kind of common bond must have drawn people together — almost certainly a religious bond.* Of course, it is this shared belief that still holds civilizations together today, not technology.
Admittedly not everything on that list involves a directly spiritual concern, so a brief defense of the selections seems in order:
Neither one of us thought Charlemagne’s title purely political. It represented a hope of reorganizing society spiritually and culturally (yes, political as well) along more unified lines. Some argue that the Holy Roman Empire never amounted to much, but it had a long run as a political and organizing force in Europe.
Whether or not the Crusades had justification in 1097, the conduct of the Crusaders and the ultimate failure of the enterprise seriously weakened the Church as an organizing force in European society. From around 1200 A.D. on, the state had much more say than previously vis a vis the Church. Whether an improvement or not, certainly this represented a new means of how people interacted with one another.
The Black Plague killed millions, and in the process effectively ended the feudal system, which had governed Europe arguably since the time of Charlemagne. In time a new middle class would arise with a new way of relating to one another
Columbus is in some ways a stand-in for Renaissance-era exploration as a whole. As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto argues in his excellent book Pathfinders, exploration did not start based on new technological discoveries. Exploration began because the way people viewed their place in the world had changed. In that sense, Columbus is a stand-in for an entirely new way of thinking.
The printing press certainly had significance. Probably it makes our top 10? But the printing press has little effect without there first existing a desire to read, a desire to interact with the world in a different way through the printed page. We should not imagine a world always hungry for books, just begging someone to invent a machine that could make them more accessible.
I am reminded, for example, of a story about Elizabeth I and toilets. Apparently indoor plumbing was created in her day, and some enterprising inventors offered her the chance to use it. Who among us would refuse indoor plumbing?
She refused. Having to go to the bathroom offended her sense of royal dignity. The bathroom, in the form of the chamber pot, would come to her. What good is being Queen if you can’t order the bathroom around anyway?
The story illustrates the point about the printing press. It’s not about the invention, but the culture surrounding the invention that matters. Culture and belief drive technology, and not vice-versa.
Dave
^In the interest of fairness, this represents my choice more so than an absolute unified agreement between the two of us. As I mentioned, we were lock-step on the other four.
*Not surprisingly, armed with his materialistic view of history, Burke essentially reduces all of the religion and mysticism of Egypt down to applied science.
Exposing oneself to older ideas has many benefits. Such a statement is almost a cliche for someone in my line of work, but then every so often the reality of this truth hits one afresh. The old world had much wisdom that we have lost.
One idea that struck me with particular force recently has to do with the early Church’s link between the reality of sin as it relates to fact of death. For Adam and Eve, sin brought death, and their progeny inherit bodies of death. After the Fall, sin now results from death. That is, we sin because we know we will die. Sin often originates in our rebellion against death.
We do this unfortunately, in a variety of ways. We distract ourselves endlessly with extended consumption.* When men reach my age they buy sports cars and get trophy wives in an attempt to feel young and powerful again. All of us feel the need for self-preservation, so when we see a chance to “extend ourselves” and grow our kingdom we seize it, whether that means invading another country or cutting someone off in traffic.
The futility of such actions is obvious on a biological level — we will die. But such actions do more than merely delay the inevitable. By making death more distant, we lose our dominion over it and thereby give it more power over our lives.
This is the main theme of Philippe Aries’ book The Hour of our Death, which stands as a greatly expanded version of his Western Attitudes toward Death.In that book he talks about the idea of a “tame” death in a more thematic manner. In this work, in minute and at times fascinating detail Aries gives the reader a multi-faceted look at how western man has died since the early Middle Ages.
I will try not to repeat myself too much from the review linked above. He begins his study under the heading “The Tame Death.” Essentially from the early Middle Ages, our approach to death consisted of . . .
A belief that death “politely” let one know of its imminent arrival. This blessed those about to die, for it gave them a chance to say goodbye and reconcile with friends and family.
Rituals that governed the process of death for the dying, which included last rites
The rituals having the effect of “taming” death*
Aries concludes his first chapter by writing,
The fact that we keep meeting instances of the same general attitude toward death from Homer to Tolstoy does not mean we should assign a historical permanence exempt from variation. . . . But for 2000 years it resisted pressures in a world subject to change . . . this attitude toward death is like a bulwark of inertia and continuity.
It has by now been so obliterated from our culture that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it.
Thus, when we call this “familiar” death the tame death, we do not mean to say that it was once wild and is now domesticated. On the contrary, we mean that it has become wild today when it used to be tame.
This “wild” state of death came about in distinct stages.
Perhaps because of the plague, the later Middle Ages depicted the gruesomeness of death and the reality of death much more frequently in their artwork. Death was far from “put aside,” but assumed a more terrible aspect.
The late Renaissance made death more about the Last Judgment than redemption in their art. Perhaps this happened as Renaissance culture knew that it had drifted from its medieval roots and sought through a kind of force — like shaking a patient — to regain some ground.
Many Protestants abandoned this Catholic practice, but as is typical in such cases, swung the other way entirely. Death no longer brought terror, but neither could it allow for mourning. Some Puritans, for example, had encouragement to remarry within a month or two of the decease of their spouse. Rather than fix the “problem” of death, this approach attempts to give death an unreality, which makes it ultimately abstract and impossible to tame.
The scientific age believed that cemeteries were unhealthy places. Burials stopped happening in or beside churches (located within the town) and got moved outside town limits. Now, too, rituals involving the dying were in jeopardy, because of the risk of disease, infection, etc. In suffering “medicalization,” death left the field of the Church and entered the field of science.
The Romantic era of the “beautiful death” attempted to correct the Enlightenment approach. But like the Puritans before them, they unintentionally swung unhelpfully in the other direction in two main ways: 1) The “beautiful death” imposed a burden on the dying to “get it right” — be tranquil, be composed, be “natural,” etc., and 2) In returning death to the provence of nature they believed they entered a beneficent realm. But nature in truth (at least according to Aries) is arbitrary, and cannot be “tamed” on its own terms. Thus, the impossibility of taming death in nature.
The modern era has abandoned rituals of almost every kind that guide cultural practice. Our societies do not pause in any way for death, unless it is perhaps the death of a statesmen or our military. Other deaths in society do not register. As the “ends” of our communal life have secularized, so too has death been secularized. The whole notion of a “communion of saints,” or a “cloud of witnesses” has disappeared utterly from nearly all Protestant churches. Without this sense of continuity or ritual, death has free reign, no controls, and again, becomes more terrible in aspect.
Aries published his book in 1981, perhaps the height of the modern medicalization of death. With the advent of hospice care and other less invasive end of life medical practices we begin to move back in a more positive direction. But we have a long way to go.
One key way back to a more proper understanding of death will involve a theological shift, as I hinted above. If we persist in the idea that God resides “up there” while we remain “down here,” we will never understand death. The same holds true for the departed. Without the communion of saints, death will continue its lordship. I quote extensively from Stephen Freeman’s Everywhere Present below to illustrate the point and show us the way forward.
At the time of my visit [to the St. Saba monastery] one of the brotherhood had “fallen asleep” two weeks earlier. “We never say that a monk has died, ” our guide told us, and I suddenly imagined the unspokenness of death I knew so well [from living in America]. He continued, “We always say, in the words of Scripture, that they have “fallen asleep.” But most we say this because we see them so often.
Now I knew I was in a different place.
“You see them?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “They appear to monks all the time. It’s nothing to see St. Saba on the stairs or elsewhere.” The witness of the monk (who happened to be from San Francisco) was not a tale of the unexpected. These were not ghostly visits he described, but the living presence of the saints who inhabit the same space as ourselves. It is a one-storey universe. Such stories . . . can be duplicated all over the monastic world.
The doctrine of the ancient Church is quite clear in this matter. Those who have died are separated from us in the body, but the Church remains One. There is not one church in heaven and another on Earth.
Dave
*Who doesn’t love Amazon Prime? But my countenance fell upon reading a recent ad of theirs for same day shipping — “Patience no longer required.”
I am very much enjoying Phillipe Aries The Hour of our Death, a magnificent and thorough study of the history of how western civilization dealt with death from its founding in the Middle Ages until now. The book has many virtues, perhaps chief among them is how illumines the vast gulf he points out between the medieval and modern world in how they dealt with death. I look forward to commenting more on Aries’ wisdom another time.
For now, however, two minor gaffes on Aries’ part can’t get out of my head. So with apologies to Aries. . .
He begins talking about death in the Song of Roland, a good place to start as 1) the story comes from the early middle ages, 2) it has the hallmarks of fully developed civilization (unlike the histories of Nottker and Einhard), and 3) it has a lot of death. He makes excellent points about how the rituals that (spoiler alert) Roland, Turpin, and Oliver perform before their deaths have the effect of “taming” death and reducing its sting. So far so good. But then he asserts that, “thoughts of reunion on the other side of death,” or even the vitality of the afterlife, had no part in their consciousness because they do not mention it. Aries quotes from Roland’s wistfulness at losing the land’s he conquered in death as evidence that early medieval man did not think much of the next life in death. We might respond that the argument from silence does not convince very much, or perhaps, that it is good evidence for how Roland felt, but perhaps not necessarily the whole of the middle ages. We could also debate the extent to which literary evidence should count as historical evidence.
In a fascinating segment Aries discusses how over time the place of burial mattered more and more. Eventually, burial within the church itself came even to supersede burial within church lands, or the church graveyard. He cites one example,
In the 17th century the parochial mass was said at the altar of the blessed sacrament. “Beneath this altar lies the body of Claude d’ Aubray, knight. Having had on this earth a wholehearted and singular devotion to to the precious body of our Savior, he desired that on his death he be laid to rest and buried next to the Blessed Sacrament, that he might obtain mercy through the prayers of the faithful who prostrate themselves before the very holy and venerable sacrament and be born again with them in glory.”
Granted, such burials did not come without a fee. But it is here that Aries, I think, misinterprets the purpose. He views the special burial as a kind of exchange — the deceased do ‘x’ so that they get ‘y,’ and thus descends into a legalistic understanding of spiritual concerns. Though throughout the book Aries offers implicit criticism in how the modern world deals with death and admires much of how the early modern world handled things. He seems to have particular admiration for the early medieval world. But, alas, he cannot escape his own modern, scientific outlook and assumes the same about the past.
We might say in response that, yes, such burials brought a certain cost, but funerals today cost as well, and likely cost more. Regardless, proper burial requires work and workers need paid.
But we can go a bit further. Aries assumes that such burials were seen as beneficial to the dead in the way that buying milk with a few dollar bills benefits the consumer. But our relationship with God, let alone our relationships with people, do not work this way. We don’t buy flowers for our wives to earn their favor, but for other, less concrete reasons. Parishioners do not cross themselves, for example, for God, but for themselves. Ritual acts proceed primarily from devotion, not duty. So too, burial within the church or within church lands has nothing to do with any kind of “exchange” for salvation, but as a way for the dead to plant their flag in the “City of God,” represented by the church. Thinking differently about death requires us to change our perspective on many other issues.
Others in earlier centuries share in Aries’ misunderstanding. He writes,
Erasmus finds [belief] in the virtues of the last rites superstitious for the same reason [as other 17th century writers]: because they seemed to designed a dissolute life to be saved ‘in extremis.’
Heaven forbid that someone be saved in their last moments after a dissolute life! That would upset the whole notion of righteousness as a kind of exchange. This legalistic understanding is not limited to our modern times.
Aries’ book illumines much, and even his modern understandings reveal the vast gulf between the modern and early modern worlds.
As the American History class reads through some excerpts from De Tocqueville, questions about the nature of equality have arisen consistently, especially in regards to the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage. The students (and to a somewhat lesser extent, myself) seem plowed over by the speed of how things have changed. In 2004, some argued that the issue of homosexual marriage helped mobilize conservatives to defeat John Kerry. Ten years later many acted as if the high Court’s decision was an inevitable byproduct of the times. The shift came swift and sure, and in some ways out of nowhere.
What happened, and why?
One could advance many reasons and theories. An extended treatment of the topic would involve an in depth look at theological and cultural shifts, and so forth. Pierre Manent’s De Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy helped me see one piece of the puzzle in stark clarity. In discussing De Tocqueville’s general political theory, he writes,
Tocqueville draws distinctions between three types of regimes: those where power is external to society (absolute monarchies), those where it is both internal and external to society (aristocracies, who reside outside the people, but reside there due to custom and tradition, thus from within the culture), and finally, the United States, where the society “acts by itself on itself,” because “there is no power except that which emanates from within.” He paints the picture of regime where the social bond is immediately political.
Aha! Here we have it, as he asserts that democratic governments have no guidance from “the state,” rather, it comes from everyone, or no one in particular. This is why we don’t always see these changes coming.
Manent continues to enumerate two main characteristics of such regimes.
Invisibility — De Tocqueville writes, “In America the laws are seen, their daily execution is perceived, everything is in movement around you, but the motor is discovered nowhere.”
Omnipresence — This invisible power is present and active. “In the New England states, the legislative power extends to more objects than are among us.” “In the United States, government centralization is at a high point. It would be easy to prove that national power there is more concentrated than it has been in any of the ancient monarchies of Europe.” De Tocqueville referred, of course, to the 1830’s — not today.
This means that, among other things, we cannot blame the courts, the media, Hollywood, or any other particular entity in society. If we don’t like something we have only two choices: blame everyone, or no one at all.
Tocqueville thought in the 1830’s that this power still mainly operated through legislative bodies and elections. Today, I can’t think of a strong legislative body in any particular state, let alone Congress itself. Change now, even more so than Tocqueville’s day, comes from the mist of the air. It concentrates quickly and becomes universal. “The social bond is immediately political.” One can debate whether or not the Supreme Court’s decision truly reflected the “average American.” But we cannot deny that the “spirit of the age” gave the Court’s decision that feeling of inevitability. We didn’t see it coming because American politics truly operate from the people, not even from our elected officials — hence the enormous power of this force. We can elect new leaders. Even kings die eventually. The people will always remain. Our institutions. then, even our guaranteed rights, should not be seen as natural byproducts of democratic government, but foreign agents sent to sabotage this unseen motor. Tocqueville believed that the insertion of the Bill of Rights checked democratic feeling, and proved the wisdom of the founders.* In general, he predicted that the massive power of the people would run through every possible crack in the Constitution and widen it immeasurably. One only has to see how we have used the commerce clause** for good and ill as yet another exhibit of Tocqueville’s keen perception.
As we might imagine, this “motor” must derive its primary source of energy from a passion for equality, not liberty. Tocqueville pointed out often that at some point these two governing principles become mutually exclusive and cancel each other out. “Liberty” might produce more individual works of great genius, but equality will give us “immediate pleasures” and a more equitable foundation for democracy. He predicted that equality would rise in prominence as the years went by and he predicted accurately.
We might think that the idea of “marriage equality” shows that we have reached the apotheosis of this democratic idea, but if we look at the culture at large I have my doubts. Movies like “Elysium” and “Snowpiercer,” tv shows like “Mr. Robot,” broader trends like the “Occupy” movement — all show that we may not be done with “Equality” just yet. This in turn made me think about a comment A.J. Toynbee made about a link between capitalism and communism. He writes in Volume Five of his A Study of History,
However that may be, the modern Western World seems to have broken virgin soil in extending the empire of Necessity into the economic field — which is indeed a sphere of social life that has been overlooked or ignored by almost all the minds that have directed the thoughts of other societies. The classic exposition of Economic Determinism is of course Karl Marx; but in the western world of today the number of souls who testify by their acts to a conviction that Economic Necessity is Queen of All is vastly greater than the number of professing Marxists, and would be found to include a phalanx of arch-capitalists who would repudiate with horror any suggestion that were fundamentally at one, in the faith by which they lived, with the execrable prophet of communism.
Many of us grew up with Democracy and Communism as bitter enemies. But Tocqueville and Manent have made me wonder, if in communism we simply have democracy’s final and untenable form.
Dave
*Though the Bill of Rights was not in the original Constitution, we can agree with Tocqueville if we interpret “founders” more broadly.
**Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” We have used the commerce clause as the basis for labor laws, farm subsidies, gun control, etc., etc. in ways I’m sure the framers of the Constitution never imagined.
In his magnum opus, The City of God, St. Augustine wrote how people define themselves not so much by what they do, or even what they believe, but by what they love. This penetrating insight led him to develop a whole theory about how the church and state operate and what goals they pursue.
St. Augustine had a classical education and certainly Plato influenced him a great deal. In fact, Augustine may very well have had the last few books of Plato’s Republic in mind as he developed his theory. For Plato argued essentially the same thing, that every form of government results from the accumulated desires of the people it governs. In other words, every society gets the kind of government that reflects their “soul” as a nation, or every nations gets the kind of government they deserve.
Plato spends the majority of The Republic laying the groundwork for the perfect state. His vision contains much that we should admire, and other aspects we should utterly reject. He had far seeing and radical ideas for his day, ideas that would remain radical for many centuries (such as the equality of men and women, and his goal to educate women the same as men). He had others that map out a modern plan for the worst state tyrannies, such as his proposal to have the state erode the family as a vital part of the state.
Some accuse Plato of living too much in an imaginary play-world, but by the end of the dialog Plato discusses the visible imperfections of governments. We would approach the issue likely by looking at the structures of governments and the distribution of powers. Plato starts with the soul, and believes that each form of government, be it oligarchy, democracy, monarchy, or the like, has its roots in souls of the people in the state. In other words, an oligarchic state will have a preponderance of “oligarchic souls” that comprise it. I suppose Plato might say that each state gets the form of government it deserves.
He starts by discussing what he calls a “timocracy,” a state where people dedicate themselves to honor. Most of these societies (Sparta and Macedon serve as examples) find that achieving honor comes most quickly in war. Thus, their drive for honor makes them a warlike state. Socrates describes the timocratic man,
He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.
Timocracies have the main advantage of dedicating themselves to something “spiritual,” beyond mere material gratification. But, as is often the case, this kind of intense dedication and shunning the world has its consequences. First, due to the intense desire to preserve honor, powerful timocratic men will not want to “put themselves out there” for fear of failure and loss of face. More significantly, his heirs likely will not take satisfaction in his purely “spiritual pursuits.” His descendants will want honor to translate into something more tangible, and so timocracy generates into oligarchy, where the souls of men seek the accumulation of wealth. Plato penetratingly blames the avaricious nature of timocratic man — he is avaricious of honor itself — for creating the more common form of avarice in his descendants. The timocratic man cares not for the education of the soul towards eternal beauty, so he is more apt to succumb to the temptations of avarice in the first place.
The defects of the oligarchic soul, and thus the oligarchic state, are many. . .
The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is ruin the of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law? And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
Likely enough.
And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.
Clearly.
And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected. And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man. They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work. And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.
Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?
You mean that they would shipwreck?
Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?
I should imagine so.
Except a city? –or would you include a city?
Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.
And here is another defect which is quite as bad, namely, the inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.
That, surely, is at least as bad.
Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.
How discreditable!
It is the lack of harmony, the lack of balance (which carries us back to our discussion about music), which brings down the oligarchic state. The pursuit of money leads to grossly top-heavy state with no guiding principle other than the accumulation of property.
The timocratical soul loves honor, the oligarchic loves money, and the democratical soul loves the empowerment of choice. The oligarchic soul fails to pursue wisdom, so he passes no guiding principle down to his children to help them govern the desires his own accumulative practices enflamed. He despised the poor, so he never bothered to train them either. The door now stands wide open for democratical man. Plato writes,
And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones spring up, which are akin to them, and because he, their father, does not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.
Though Plato has some praise for democracy, he believes that democratical soul may be the poorest of all, for in the end he pursues nothing outside of himself, nothing outside of whatever he desires at a given moment. It is this passion for choice that Plato believes guides democratic man — a passion ultimately for “the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.” He writes,
Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
The democratic state, then, can have no harmony, because democratic man himself has no internal harmony. He pursues many things, but none of them well, none with any depth. The virtues of patience, moderation, and deliberation stand as enemies to “Choice” — they impede choice because they slow down “Choice.” Thus, democratic man eventually dispenses with them, and with him the state. Finally the disharmony and competition engendered by “Choice” becomes unmanageable. At this point, we crave the end result of choice, self-gratification, more than what attained us this gratification, which was Choice itself. We will then want a tyrant to control the conflict and make sure we can still attain the life of pleasure that Choice brought us.
Plato’s harsh critique of democracy should give us pause and have us consider a few points. A quick glance seems to show that the decline of the Church in the west has brought about the rise of the god “Choice.” We spend much time, money, and resources developing technology to enhance our seemingly limitless ability to choose. Policies like abortion and homosexual marriage receive their justification from the concept of choice itself: we chose it, and that fact trumps all others. Christians may rightly object to such practices, but must realize that “Choice” stands as a fundamentally different god. Death has also come under the dominion of Choice, as some states now legalize assisted suicide, which allows for us to exit this life on our terms.
Our founders certainly had awareness of this problem. In the Federalist #10 Madison ingeniously turned Plato’s argument somewhat on its head. He claimed that the multiplicity of choice would create a multiplicity of factions. So long as none gained too much of a majority they would cancel each other out, and preserve liberty thereby. Whether this has proven true in the long run remains to be seen. Plato would surely argue that a government with disharmony actually built into the system (as opposed to it being a by-product in timocracies and oligarchies) could never have any real stability. Without this stability, tyranny could not be far away.
We will have to wait until later to consider a defense of democracy. For now, I hope that Plato’s critique will sink in to the students and help them see the strengths and weaknesses of democracy more clearly.
My disclaimer to all my posts is that I am strictly an amateur historian, and perhaps no more so than in the post below . . .
A frequent topic of conversation among historians is the nature of decline and fall. Is the collapse of a particular civilization essentially inevitable, or can a civilization continue unto the end of all things? Others nuance the dilemma a bit by stating that decline and fall remains eminently likely but possible to stave off.
Discussion about decline in the ancient and medieval world involved the concept of Fortune. For the ancients, Fortune could often have the sense of arbitrary incoherence. Troy must fall — Hector knows this. As to why or to what end, he has no idea and seemingly cares not to know. Not even Zeus seems to know why Troy must fall. Fate, that awful word, never strayed far from the mind of the ancients.
Medieval thinkers sought to have a generous spirit and wanted to give Fortune a place in the Divine scheme. Dante describes Lady Fortune as one of God’s servants. She dispensed with blessings and setbacks indiscriminately, yes, but not for an unknown purpose. God always wants to show forth his kingly munificence and have that imaged on Earth for all to see. At the same time, all must learn humility, for without humility, who can be saved? Blessings and rewards (in Fortune’s kingdom) not so much because of sin or righteousness but to teach grand lessons about salvation. That is why Fortune is “Lady Fortune,” for the same reason St. Francis called death “our Sister, Bodily Death.” Both have the gentle, nurturing female touch despite the pain they bring.
Eric Voegelin’ s treatment of Polybius in his Order and History intrigued me. Perhaps the most famous section of Polyblius’ work is in Book VI where he discusses the cycle of rise and fall that preys upon all civilizations. What makes this section of particular for me is that Polybius writes about Rome’s rise from ca. 270-200 B.C., but writes himself around 140 B.C. when cracks in the Republic started becoming evident. It gives Polybius an unusual vantage point.
Voegelin, a notable critic of “disembodied” interpretive methods of history, makes two points worth noting in his treatment of Polybius.
The first surrounds the idea of cause and effect. At times Polybius, like his fellow Greek Herodotus before him, has a tendency to extend the cause beyond comprehensible reason, placing the fulcrum for events he discusses have orgins long before anyone living at the time can recall. Of course Polybius distinguishes between direct and distant causes, but the question is one of proportion. If everything can be a cause, then nothing is a cause. If the real cause has roots beyond the knowledge or experience of anyone living, then things “just happen.” Both practices could be described as gnostic because both encourage us to live in a world without responsibility, in a state disconnected from creation.
The second concerns Polybius’ ultimate failure to find a true cause. This leads him in turn to focus first on the bare reality of Rome’s practices, how they built forts, how they made laws, and so on. He pays little attention to whether the laws be good or bad, or what particular advantage the forts might have given them. This focus on the pure “physics” of things likely explain his drift into explaining everything with the Wheel of Fortune, which has in his mind an arbitrary quality. Polybius quotes from the last Macedonian king with evident approval, who said,
If you take not an indefinite time, nor many generations, but just the last 50 years, you will see the cruelty of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you suppose that the Macedonians or the Persians, if some god foretold it, would have believed by the present time that the Persians, who once ruled the world, would by now have ceased to be a name, while the Macedonians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet this Fortune, who never keeps faith, but transforms everything against our reckoning . . . has lent him these good things until she decides to dispose differently of them (XXIX, 21).
Later Polybius, with Scipio in at the destruction of Carthage he records Scipio’s foreboding that now that Persia, Macedon, and Carthage had been destroyed, perhaps Rome would now be next. But just as with the king of Macedon, no intelligible cause would exist. Fortune does what she wills, leaving mankind ‘not guilty’ for whatever happens.
Of course others took up this idea before Polybius, notably Plato himself in The Republic. Some accuse Plato of gnosticism and he can drift in that direction at times, but his analysis has its roots not so much in disembodied fate but in the lives of individuals. When thinking about the transition from oligarchy to democracy he discusses the choices and desires of individuals. So the “oligarchic man/men” lead the transition from timocracy to oligarchy. The “democratic man” in turn brings about democracy, and so on. The city-state contains the accumulated souls of its inhabitants, thus the city too might be said to have a “soul” in aggregate. It too chooses. It too has responsibility. A brief excerpt discussing “democratic man” shows his method:
Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
Plato refuses to submit everything to “Fortune/Fate” and this makes hima greater thinker, and in another sense, the greater historian (see — this is why you read this blog, so you can find out shocking things such as, “Plato was a more profound thinker than Polybius.” Thank goodness for A Stick in the Mud!).
Sometimes the meaning of Jesus’ words, and their application, seem entirely obvious once you read them.
Sometimes He confounded His audiences both then and now. He did not always seek to give answers. It seems to me that sometimes He wants to draw us deeper into a Mystery.
His command to be “wise as serpents, and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16) has always perplexed me. Do we have to be one or the other, or can we be both wise and innocent at the same time? The command to be “innocent as doves” seems easy to understand, but of course hard to achieve. The first part apparently asks us to mimic the cleverness of the Devil, which might seem easier to our fallen selves but surely more dangerous. And how to apply this first admonition? I have no idea.
I thought about this saying of Jesus during one particular section of Kyriacos Markides The Mountain of Silence, a series of interviews with one particular monk from the monastery on Mount Athos. I strongly recommend the work, not because of the author but because for most of the book he simply allows his subjects to speak at length. Early on in the book the author tells of two events in the life of the monastery.
In W.W. II the Nazi’s began to overrun Greece and the monks on Mount Athos wondered what they might do. The monastery is located at the very edge of one of the Chalcedonian peninsulas and remains somewhat isolated territorially. As a pre-emptive strike of sorts, they decided to ask Hitler to put the monastery under his personal protection. They correctly deduced that Hitler would be flattered to do so, which might have spared the area damage from bombs, or at least allowed the monks to stay. They then proceeded to use their privileged position to hide many Jewish women from the Nazi’s, the only time in their long history that they have allowed women within their walls.
Turkey invaded Greece in 1974, which again endangered both the physical structures of the monastery and its spiritual independence. This time the monks made a special appeal to Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union to have the monastery put under his personal protection. Perhaps they hoped to hearken to Russia’s own special monastic tradition. Or perhaps they hoped to appeal to Russia’s rivalry with Turkey in the late 19th/early 20th century over the fate of the Balkan Orthodox Christians.
Both instances, and especially the appeal to Hitler, did not at first impression sit well with me. But then I reconsidered. In neither case did the monks side with their protectors. They stood above the purely national aspects of the wars — but not the moral ones. They had the foresight to use Hitler’s vanity for good. In the second instance they may have exhibited real foresight in standing above the national aspects of that conflict. Alas, based on what very little I have read, it appears that many Mediterranean churches use the events of the 1970’s as a rallying point for Greek nationalism and ignored deeper spiritual aspects. The monks on Mount Athos avoided this.
Might we consider these actions as correct applications of the Jesus’ words cited above? Perhaps.
One can springboard from thoughts about these incidents to speculations about the relationship between the church and state, something the church in the west may have to reconsider in light of recent events. In western thought the classic exposition of the issue came from St. Augustine’s City of God where he outlined the nature and purpose of the “City of Man” and the “City of God” — in simplistic terms — the state and the church respectively. Augustine seems to advocate cooperation between the two when it appears that interests genuinely align, even though they may seek to achieve the same ends for very different reasons.
This sounds entirely reasonable. It looks like something along the lines of what the monks of Athos did in the circumstances cited above. But I wonder about its applicability in modern democracies, a context Augustine did not envision.
A monarch or emperor has the sum total of political power in his hands. He may share power with unofficial advisers or an an official council like a Senate. But whether an absolute ruler or no, the power remains with him. In these situations the Church can easily stand aside and say, “This is good king, we can work with him, ” or the opposite as the case may be. Whether they cooperate or no, they stand outside the power structure and can detach themselves (in theory) from it with ease.
But in democracies power coheres with the amorphous “majority.” Cooperation in the sense Augustine entails with a democracy would likely mean the need to become part of the power structure itself. Standing outside said structure effectively puts you within the minority. Influencing government would then involve not cooperation with the City of Man but joining the City of Man. Of course in a monarchy all are equal because everyone is in the minority.
We shall need great wisdom to navigate this dilemma in the coming years.
I always enjoy musicians who can talk intelligently about their music. Glenn Gould combined his brilliant technique with a brilliant mind, and thankfully, availed himself of many opportunities to speak.
The video appeals to me on a number of levels. For starters musician and filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon almost parodies the speech and approach of a rather stuffy French intellectual (though I would never assert that’s what he actually was). What really intrigued me, however, was their discussion of whether or not one can truly play Bach on a piano instead of a harpsichord, which leads then to other digressions.
Gould breaks down composers into two types:
The first seek to create the “ultimate” piece that can only be played in very specific ways, in very specific settings. Such composers, he argues, concern themselves primarily with the reception of the music rather than the music itself.
The second (whom he clearly prefers) concern themselves with the structural integrity of the music itself. Gould always admired Bach for his “vertical and horizontal” integrity. That is (I think) the piece went somewhere definite (vertical), but never at the expense of the relationship of the notes to each other (horizontal).
Certainly Bach has been a much more enduring composer than either in the first group Gould mentions. Who can think of Paganini without the violin, or Liszt without some long-haired guy playing the piano? But Bach shows up everywhere, with mandolins, saxophones, organs, and in different genres like jazz and even some heavy-metal. His structural integrity allows then, for improvisation and modification.* The fact of his endurance and applicability must give us hints as to how to operate in other areas of life.
Historian Arnold Toynbee talked about the traps that civilizations fall into that bring them down. I appreciate that Toynbee often gave a spiritual focus to this topic, and focused on “idolization” of ephemeral techniques or institutions as one key problem. In other words, at some point in the past a particular institution or method helped achieve some great good. The solution to our present concerns then, means returning to some point in the past. Toynbee comments,
We can see that this nemesis would bring on social breakdowns in two distinct ways. On the one hand it would diminish the number of possible candidates for playing the creator’s role in the face of any possible challenge . . . On the other hand . . . these ex-creators, by virtue of their previous work, will now be in positions of power and influence. In these positions they will not be helping the society move forward any longer; they will be “resting on their oars.”
Classical education, it seems, can easily fall into the temptations of the first category of composers above. We, perhaps unlike others, seek the “perfect” for all time in our educational content and methods. This in turn can lead us to idolize the past, freeze it, and bring it forward to today. But if we do this we forget that education involves primarily the transmission of certain experiences and beliefs from one generation to the next. For it to transfer, it must have life, which means it must have some degree of wiggle-room and applicability in different contexts. Athens’ own history is an example. With their curiosity and passion for eternal things they might have created the idea of classical education. But eventually they became a parody of themselves. “For the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21).
But then one might counter — isn’t that what public schools essentially do? They have a curriculum that is essentially interchangeable and standardized. This curriculum, based on the standardized test, can then be easily transferred from one teacher to another. In many classical schools, curriculum seems much more teacher-centric and would not transfer nearly as easily.
However, such approaches to curricula are essentially gnostic. They have no incarnation. Without a definite incarnation of an idea or method in the person of a particular teacher, there can be no power, no application, no life. The Spirit could not descend until after the Son had come.
Perhaps we can conclude by saying that if one ever writes curriculum, pay extra attention to its structure instead of its sound. When we play Bach, let Bach be Bach. But be sure to put something of yourself into your own performance. I have never understood objections to those who say, “But Bach wouldn’t have played it that way.” We do not go to concerts to hear Bach play, after all.**
Dave
*I remember reading one musician who said something like, “If Bach was alive today he would be a jazz musician.” For those interested I include here part of an interview with the famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett conducted by fellow piano player Ethan Iverson, on the subject of Bach.
EI: Do you play the piano every day?
KJ: Now I do, yeah. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do. It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another.
I was just working on Bach over the last few months, and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert, and while I’m pretending that, that’s practicing. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach, but now I’m playing the Bach, and for the last twenty-five minutes I do the other thing and it works very well. Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
EI: So, at one point, going between jazz and classical felt like more of an embouchure change than it does now? Is it beginning to even out?
KJ: It really depends. When I was getting ready to record Mozart I couldn’t have mixed both. And in general, that’s the case. I generally don’t mix things. But I’ve seen how it seems to work this time, and I’m just taking advantage of it. Probably I’m in better shape than I was before, due to some of the patterns Bach forces upon you. The jazz player doesn’t ever play these patterns: they don’t come up; certainly not in the left hand. And working on the fingering puts you in a hypnotic state, playing the same phrase down one half step at a time or down a scale, and you’re doing the same fingering but it isn’t the same fingering, depending on how many black keys are involved. And Bach has this crazy ability to change key in the middle of a scale. So you’ve changed harmonic center in the process of playing what you thought was a simple scale so you can’t take your eyes off the music. And even with the bass line, if you stop looking you think you know what it is, but he always thought it out so well that it’s not always not predictable, but his note is always better than yours.
EI: Do you work out your fingerings early on, or keep experimenting?
KJ: I’ve had all kinds of experiences. With the Shostakovich, I just played it and played it and played it. When I realized I was going to record it, I had to say to myself, wait: I’ve got to find an edited version of this with fingerings! Because what I normally do is find different fingerings every time I play, probably. I just improvise that part of it. It works sometimes, but it doesn’t work in the studio, when you don’t want to do a second take. So I went through three different editions of the Shostakovich and ended up with absolutely no fingering: theUrtext, with no fingerings at all, and that’s always what I prefer in the end. With the Bach, I’ve been able to stick with that. I don’t even like making a mark on the page…
**If you listen to Glenn Gould recordings of Bach you will usually hear him humming faintly in the background. Some object to this, but I like it. It reminds me that the music I’m hearing doesn’t come to me disembodied, but from a real person in love with the music he plays. Thus, Gould recordings can nearly achieve the immediacy of a live performance.
Thanks to Marginal Revolution once again for sharing a fascinating but perhaps not surprising article about ethics professors. The upshot is, apparently, they do not act any more ethically than the rest of us.
So the natural question arises then, what good are professors who teach ethics? Would it be possible for an ethics professor to live badly and teach ethics well? What about other disciplines?
Of course 99% of ethical questions seem perfectly obvious to answer. So, as a friend pointed out, professors of ethics have to make their hay in the disputed areas where debate exists and the classroom might get a bit more interesting. The article states,
An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.
In other words, there lies the implicit belief that to teach well one must distance oneself from the material so as to be more “even-handed.”
This gets at the whole purpose of teaching and education in general. What follows below attempts to reproduce a conversation I had with a good friend and colleague.
If we hope to arrive at satisfactory conclusions regarding ethics or other subjects, we must start first with theology, the “queen of the sciences.”
One can take two basic approaches to God:
Know something, believe something, then finally love something, or
Love something, believe, then know
Scripture and the history of God’s people clearly endorse the latter option, though in modern times we tend to prefer the first. In the Psalms we see numerous examples of something like this:
The author struggles with evil
Doubts God’s presence, His goodness
Goes to worship God, then
Arrives at the right knowledge and understanding of who God is
So too in the Gospels, Jesus rebukes the people when they ask for a sign. We shouldn’t interpret this so much as Jesus saying, “You’re so weak and impatient!” but more like, “That’s not how you can truly know me,” which is what He wants for all of us.
The idea of establishing some kind of clinical distance from God and taking a piece of him out to examine is utterly absurd. Surely even skeptics would agree that such an approach would not allow us to know God, and if it could, what kind of God would we have? So the best theologian would have the best prayer life, whatever form that took.
In an ecumenical environment the Bible teacher might need an even-handed approach with certain topics. In teaching baptism he may need to give arguments for and against infant baptism. But his goal should be to have students love baptism. If a student came to the said teacher privately and asked, “Which do you believe?” we would rightly be aghast if he said, “I have no commitment either way. It’s all the same to me. I baptized one of my kids as an infant and another as an adult.” The teacher would not love baptism. For him, the discussion he led remained a mere game. He would not teach his students to love baptism, but to think of baptism as a mere game.
So “detachment” from a particular conclusion may have its place at times, but knowing how and when depends. The idea of “analyzing” God is absurd for so many reasons. He is mystery and entirely transcendent. Perhaps the level of analysis we apply has to do with the degree of mystery and transcendence in our subject. A music teacher hears a piece of music and thinks, “What a great song. I love it.” This love then might lead them to analyze the piece and its tempo, chord changes, and so on. But who would begin with analysis? No one says to themselves, “This song has ‘x’ tempo, ‘y’ chord changes, and ‘z’ meter, so therefore I love this song.” The transcendent qualities of great music, and the mysterious nature of its effect on us, renders that approach almost meaningless.
Indirectly the study of History should lead us to the love of God, just as in any other subject. But that’s not the first port of call, but the second. Directly History involves the study of people. Most of us know that we remain a mystery to ourselves. What of our perception of others, and how should this impact our methodology? Music has transcendent qualities, but do everyday people? The question is difficult. In biology the need to lead with “love” over “analysis” gets much reduced because we have dominion over matter. As Pascal stated, matter might crush us, but we know it does so, while matter has no consciousness. We should analyze the bacteria before deciding whether or not to “love” it.
For the relationship between love and analysis for the History teacher, let us imagine three different teachers numbered 1-3:
This teacher has a passionate love and identification with the colonial cause and the American Revolution. With just as much passion, he also teaches his students that Nazi fascism is evil. His students absorb his passion and his conclusions in both subjects.
This teacher has no firm conclusions about the American Revolution and feels it a “tough call either way.” He teaches both sides of the argument well. When teaching W.W. II, however, he also teaches the evil of Nazi fascism. His students split on their opinions about the Revolution. On fascism they come out of his class with a more full understanding of evil.
This teacher has no firm conclusions on either the American Revolution or W.W. II. When it comes to the Nazis he remains “objective” and even-handed, giving arguments for and against the merits of their world view. Some of his students take the British side, some the American. Some of his students take the Allied side, some identify with the Axis powers.
Teacher ‘3’ should never teach. His teaching would lead people either to cynicism or evil living. No good history teacher should consistently produce students who apply their knowledge to live evil lives.
But would we prefer teacher ‘1’ or ‘2’?
Theology has two basic approaches to God. One is the way of affirmation — what we can truthfully say about God (Dante stands as the greatest master of this “way” still today, in my opinion). Apophatic theology stresses that we can know God best by stating what He is not. God is so fundamentally “other” from us that our affirmations will always remain deeply inadequate. Both approaches have their place. In the discipline of History I think the way of negation safer.*
We can say with certainty that God is not “in” the Nazi regime. We lack the same certainty when discussing the American Revolution. In History in general I think we can more often say what God is not than what God is.
This should not mean that we should have a goal of the “detached” teacher. When we think of great teachers we had in the past we probably think of teachers that had a definite point of view. They loved something about their subjects. The key to teaching History well must lie in deciding what the proper object of love is in the study of History.
If we attach our love too heartily to particular people, eras, or civilizations we will likely obscure their faults and not teach them truly. But a worse fate would mean becoming one of those historians that loves to point out everything bad about everything and seems to enjoy nothing at all. The first teacher would wrongly order his love but at least love something. The second has only cynicism and no sympathy for anyone or anything.
Nor should we say that what we love the process of investigation or method in the study of history. We can use the term “love” in this case to mean “I find a certain process of investigation useful.” But who can truly “love” a process? What good is the process? Where does it lead?
So to return to our question above . . .
I lean towards teacher #2. Teacher #1 has the distinct advantage of communicating a clear passion (of course the American Revolution is just a stand-in for other events/people, political parties, that involve moral grey areas, etc.). It’s easier to have a passionate dislike as opposed to something positive, so he gets credit there as well. But teacher #2 can still have passion and communicate a love for much more than a process even if he has more caution in what he attaches himself to. Applied rightly, the method he uses extends his sympathy and his humility. This humility goes beyond intellectual humility. The historian sees the complexity of a situation and realizes that salvation cannot come in this world and that failure inevitably comes. We would not necessarily have acted more wisely had we been in their place.
What we love through this method, finally and hopefully, involves a vision and a desire for the Kingdom of God made manifest. This should not preclude us having a warm attachment to certain people and places in history. It might protect us from the danger of idolatry inherent in the “Way of Affirmation.”** It seeks our own redemption as we identify with those in the past. It seeks the redemption of others as we see their need for transformation of the fallenness of the world.
The dance between idolatry and detachment will always remain delicate, but we should understand that we’re near the truth when we see this tension. Such tension lies throughout Christianity. God is One God in three distinct Persons. Christ is God and man, and so on. When faced with such a dilemma we affirm both equally and finitely hold them in tension as best we can.
The time has come to end this rambling before I exhaust any more of your patience.
“Too late!” say my kids.
Dave
*The way of affirmation usually involves metaphors or similes. The potential problem with this is our reference point which inevitably involves our own experience. For a few centuries we said God designed the universe like a clock maker makes a clock. Now that the clock has gone out of fashion, we no longer use this metaphor. Did God create like a clock maker? Maybe, but probably not? How can we be sure? Perhaps we can see some faint or very basic connection between creation and the clock, but I think it safer to say God did not create the universe like a clock.
**The danger of the “Way of Negation” would probably involve a safe detachment that precluded practicing love. Taken to extreme, could such an approach prevent one from loving even oneself? If that happened, we could not love others either.
A Stick in the Mud 